>>Can those of you who have drop-in problem-based bf clinics tell me how
that works for you?  We're considering having a drop-in lactation clinic in
our pediatric clinic setting a few times a week.

We began one last summer, in the same "community room" that hosts our LLL
meetings.  It's just 1 hour a week, staffed by two IBCLCs or, occasionally,
an IBCLC and a Leader.  So every week, Wednesdays at 10 am, mothers can get
breastfeeding help of some kind at that spot.  

There's a sign-in sheet; beyond that, no one signs anything.  We don't touch
the mothers or babies, and we use no equipment.  Our idea was that it would
provide a triage arrangement for mothers in the early weeks - dr, IBCLC
consult, LLL, or on-the-spot fix.  And of course we hoped it would
eventually increase our business (there are 4 of us).  We wondered about
privacy.  Certainly we pictured a woman coming in and going off into a
corner with one of us, or waiting patiently until she could.

It hasn't worked that way at all!  The mothers themselves have shaped it
into something quite different.

If it's one person for the whole hour, she gets 2 IBCLCs all to herself.  We
chat, we try some things, and so on.

If there are two mothers, we start one-on-one but may merge into
two-with-two.  If it's more than that, it becomes a mini-League meeting,
with mothers peeling off to spend time one-on-one, sometimes with the whole
group tagging along, or with one or two joining because that topic is more
pertinent to them.  For a few weeks we had a little "oversupply group"
supporting one another.  Sometimes the mother gets more help from the group
than she would from us.  

We've referred a couple for frenotomy, but our overall business has actually
*declined*, which frankly delights me (though not all of us would say that).
It means we've been "over-medicalizing" a lot of our past clients, who would
have done just as well by having regular support from other mothers.  Some
of them take longer to get better, but many seem to prefer a weekly tweaking
in the presence of "friends" to a heavy-duty full-blown one-on-one consult
with one-on-one follow-up.  Not everyone, of course, but we've seen mothers
limp their way out of a hole who are just fine with the limping, with a
chance for someone to review it weekly.  I think this approach means they
retain total ownership of the whole process.  We make no follow-up phone
calls, we don't "invest ourselves" in these mothers at all.  And yet they
tend to do well.  

In essence, the mothers have re-created LLL meetings but with a little more
fix-it shop approach.

It's too soon to know much.  Our numbers have been small (typically 2 to 5
each week) and it's been less than a year.  But I love the simplicity of it,
the knowing that for this hour, our job isn't to fix big problems but to
talk about next moves.  And I love the way mothers have taken our intended
rather medical approach and morphed it into something much more
mother-friendly. and much more fun for us all.

Diane Wiessinger, MS, IBCLC, LLLL  Ithaca, NY  USA 

  

 

 

 


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