Deena asks why health professionals tell mothers things about breastfeeding
which undermine their confidence and aren't accurate.  I think it is because
there is still no consistant training and no identified core curriculum for
lactation science. There are also too few opportunities to observe clinical
techniques in practicum situations.  It is both dangerous to consumers and
unfair to ask people to deliver services for which they are inadequately
prepared, yet it is done in lactation support all the time.  People read
something in a book, or overhear a remark and take it as gospel, or go to
one conference and think they know all there is to know about a subject.
This is not preparation sufficient to protect consumers.  What must be kept
in the fore at all times is that we serve the mother-baby dyad.  Their
safety, their ability to have recourse if we screw up, their ultimate
well-being is the purpose of our activity.  Our training programs, our
out-come monitoring efforts, our ethics review mechanisms, our philosophies
about the direction of the profession, should all be consumer oriented.

  All of us should be doing our individual parts to insist on a movement
toward identifying the body of knowledge which one should be in possession
of to be called a lactation consultant.  Then the curriculum should be
accredited, so that anyone wanting to provide professional lactation
education would have both course and teachers assessed for competancy and
consistency with core standards.  Then when people sit the IBCLE exam we
have an assurance for the consumer that the practicioner has knowledge
consistent with the core curriculum, and has mastered it in an entry level
exam.  I would like to see the curriculum taught in universities, but
comprehensive courses are another alternative.

 After this happens,  I would  like to see the title LC protected.  Not to
emphasize some elitist notion of superiority but because consumers deserve
to know who is delivering the service, and that ought to include having some
awareness of their training.  To take this out of the realm of lactation
support, ask yourself if you'd like to be given an injection by someone who
had never been trained to give one, or have your divorce handled by your
next door neighbor who attended a do-it-yourself law seminar.  Now much of
breastfeeding support is not rocket science, and very often just
encouragement and rudimentary knowledge are all it takes for assisting the
normal mother and baby.  We don't need lactation specialists for all phases
of lactation support.  But Deena is right on when she talks about simple
misunderstanding of basics being a huge disincentive for mothers.  Witness
the numbers of women with cracked nipples who have been assured their baby
is latched on perfectly.

Barbara














Barbara Wilson-Clay, BS, IBCLC
Private Practice, Austin, Texas
Owner, Lactnews On-Line Conference Page
http://moontower.com/bwc/lactnews.html