Breastfeeding
(asked on 31st January 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to promote the health benefits of exclusively breastfeeding babies; and what steps his Department is taking to enable babies born prematurely to receive a human milk based diet.
The Government is committed to supporting mothers to breastfeed their babies where possible, especially during the first six months. We would like to see more mothers breastfeeding and doing so for longer and are working with our partners including Public Health England (PHE), NHS England, UNICEF and others to achieve this goal.
Support and information, including on the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding, is provided through various sources. Examples include NHS Choices, the National Breastfeeding Helpline, PHE’s Start4life, UNICEF UK Baby Friendly Initiative and local peer support parents. The PHE interactive Breast-Feeding Friend voice product ‘chatbot’ is now available through Facebook Messenger, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant and provides live breastfeeding support to new mums at any time of day.
The promotion of breastfeeding is one of the six high-impact areas for health visiting. The mandated contact points are an opportunity for health visitors to support parents around infant feeding. Contact takes place antenatally, at 10 to 14 days and six to eight weeks after birth. Further information on ‘Early years high impact area three: Breastfeeding’ can be viewed at the following link:
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s guidelines on postnatal care and neonatal care sets out standards for supporting women to breastfeed whether their babies are born at term or preterm, including being supported to express milk.
The Department’s Toolkit for High-Quality Neonatal Services states that as a standard maternity and neonatal services should encourage breastfeeding and the expression of milk through the provision of information and dedicated support.
The ‘Advancing our health: prevention in the 2020s’ consultation, invited views on how we can do more to support mothers to breastfeed. The consultation closed in October 2019. We will set out our response to the consultation by spring 2020.