Several years ago WHO and UNICEF developed a joint decalogue in order to promote breastfeeding: "The ten steps towards a happy natural breastfeeding" for maternity services and care for newborns. These ten steps are the center of this year's celebration of World Breastfeeding Week.
We can find them in a comprehensive document entitled "Protection, promotion and support of breastfeeding: special role of maternity services. Joint WHO / UNICEF declaration" (Geneva, WHO, 1989).
Here we show you these ten standards, for health centers, issued by these international organizations to promote breastfeeding. It is important to know and assume those standards, both by health professionals and by mothers and fathers.
And it is that among the objectives of the strategy of feeding infants and young children, of the World Health Organization itself, is to ensure that all institutions that provide maternity services fully practice all of these ten steps towards a happy natural breastfeeding:
- Step 1. Have, in writing, a policy on breastfeeding that is systematically made known to all health care personnel.
- Step 2. Train all health personnel so that they are in a position to implement that policy.
- Step 3. Inform all pregnant women about the benefits offered by breastfeeding and how to put it into practice.
- Step 4. Help mothers start breastfeeding for half an hour after delivery. (We have already spoken to you in Babies and more of the importance of early contact between mother and newborn)
- Step 5. Teach mothers how to breastfeed and how to breastfeed, even if they are to be separated from it.
- Step 6. Do not give newborns more than breast milk, without any other food or drink, unless medically indicated.
- Step 7. Facilitate the joint accommodation of mothers and their children 24 hours a day.
- Step 8. Encourage breastfeeding on demand.
- Step 9. Do not give children breast fed teats or pacifiers.
- Step 10. Encourage the establishment of support groups for breastfeeding and ensure that mothers contact them when they leave the hospital or clinic.
Surely, for the moment, each one of us could report cases in which these recommendations are not followed, and few hospitals can boast a policy that is truly in line with them. The Children's Friends Hospitals can do it, and they are an example.
I wish these Ten steps to achieve a happy breastfeeding were considered in all their importance in all maternity hospitals.
