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Becoming a breastfeeding-friendly practice

This project is likely to take:
<10-20 hours for the initial project (excluding re-audit)
<10-20 hours in total (including re-audit)

Can be carried out by any staff member

Green Impact for Health Toolkit area: Prescribing & Quality Improvement

CQC Areas

  • Responsive (Providing information)
  • Well-led (Learning, Improvement & Innovation)
  • Well-led (Environmental Sustainability)

On this page

The benefits of this project

Project benefits for Your Patients

Benefits for Your Patients

  • Improved experience for patients and staff who are breastfeeding.
  • Improved infant and maternal health outcomes.    
  • Reduced health inequalities as breastfeeding rates are particularly low in  disadvantaged socio-economic groups.
Project benefits for Your Practice

Benefits for Your Practice

  • Moderate increases in breastfeeding rates could save up to £40 million due to fewer GP consultations and hospital admissions.
Project benefits for The Planet

Benefits for The Planet

  • Overall, breastfeeding for six months saves an estimated 95-153 kgCO2e per baby compared with formula feeding. 
  • For the UK alone, carbon emissions savings gained by supporting mothers to breastfeed would equate to taking between 50 000 and 77 500 cars off the road each year.

Opportunity for improvement

  • The World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) recommend that children are exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months of life and then continue breastfeeding alongside solid food until age 2 or beyond.
  • Breastfeeding is associated with improved infant and maternal health outcomes and can save lives.  It is also associated with healthcare cost savings, uses minimal resources and generates little waste.    
  • Despite this, breastfeeding rates in the UK are among the lowest in the world. The reasons for this are complex; UNICEF state that with access to well-trained health professionals, good quality community social support, a widespread understanding of the benefits of breast milk, and an acceptance within society that breastfeeding is normal would remove many of the barriers preventing mothers breastfeeding for as long as they want.  
  • This project outlines how to become a breastfeeding friendly practice (see disclaimers). Becoming a breastfeeding friendly surgery will improve patient care and experience and help to facilitate changing the culture around breastfeeding.  This has the potential to improve breastfeeding rates and all the associated benefits to patients, practices, and the planet.  
  • You might like to create SMART goals for your project. Within the next 2 months, invite all staff to participate in a staff survey on breastfeeding awareness, run an education session for all staff and then re-survey staff.  

How to carry out this project

  1. Baseline data collection

    Adapt this survey for use in your practice and gather responses from staff.  

  2. Create a policy

    Adapt this breastfeeding and infant feeding policy for your practice and share it with staff via email, newsletters, and practice meetings.  You might like to get input from your local health visitors, midwives and GPs involved in baby checks.  

     

  3. Breastfeeding-friendly spaces

    Chat with the practice manager to ensure the practice has quiet private spaces for patients and staff to breastfeed and put up posters encouraging breastfeeding.  

  4. Patient information

    Design a text message detailing where and how to access infant feeding support to send to patients when needed.  

  5. Training

    Run an education session for clinical staff on the basics of breastfeeding and how to manage commonly presenting problems, emphasising when and how to refer to local feeding support services.  

  6. Post-intervention data collection

    Re-survey staff (after an appropriate interval) to see if there has been any change in awareness. 

  7. Study

    Review the results, summarise learning, share with practice team + decide if any changes are needed to improve the process. Decide when to review the project to ensure the change has lasted e.g. 6-12 months and use the Project Monitoring form to keep track.  

Top tip

Keep a non-judgmental approach.

Staff may have their own experiences of infant feeding, so be sensitive.

How to scale this project up or down

Please note – Use of this project requires NetworkPLUS membership. If you would like to share this project with others, please invite them to purchase their own membership—access must not be shared with non-members.

You could share your findings and infant feeding policy with your wider health organisation e.g. your PCN and consider adopting a PCN-wide policy. You could also share it with your Federation, ICB (England) or Cluster, Health Board (Scotland or Wales) or GP federation, Health Trust (Northern Ireland), so the learning can be shared and the project easily implemented by other practices too. 

You could go more in depth into auditing the management of certain conditions such as nipple pain, mastitis or reflux, deliver an education session and then re-audit.  

You could set up an infant feeding champion scheme in your wider health organisation e.g. PCN, or even ICB – see here for inspiration: https://gpifn.org.uk/the-gp-infant-feeding-champion/   

Have you completed this QIP?

Tell us a little about your project and enter your data in order to generate a certificate showing the probable benefits. This project may help with CQC evidence submission (see disclaimers).

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