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Although I agree with Marsha Walker that lactation counsellor training needs
to be of the highest quality, I do not see a lactation counsellor as a
medical advisor in general.
Just as nurses and midwives are not automatically qualified to teach in
prenatal courses or to give in-depth lactation counselling, so lactation
counsellors who come from other professions should not pose as professional
medics. For that reason, in NCT and its former Israel sister organization
ICEC, we did not demand that applicants to our training courses be nurses or
midwives. The professions of education, psychology, occupational therapy,
social work are just as relevant to counselling as medical knowledge. Of
course counsellors need basic physiology because breastfeeding is a
biological function but often associated with a Pandora`s box of social and
psychological issues.
And it is vital that we have a general knowledge of all womens health
issues. I do feel that it is part of my job to encourage a client to
investigate further if she has worrying symptoms and her doctor brushes them
off as normal for the postnatal and breastfeeding period.
With the focus on preparing for exams and studying physiology I wonder how
many lactation courses including IBCLC are giving enough time to role-play
and coping with the many situations that we meet in our day-to-day practice.
How much value is put on preparing for breastfeeding in prenatal classes, do
counsellors know how to support a woman after loss of a baby inter-uterine,
at birth or in the first months. Having gone through this myself, one of
the most painful physical and emotional aspects was my breasts producing
milk for a baby that wasn`t there. How much of all this is included in all
these lactation training courses that are springing up all over the place.
Is there any focus on support/lack of from the extended family, the woman
who can`t breastfeed in her living-room because her father-in-law is sitting
there and doesn`t like it, the grandmother who never breastfed and is
determined that her daughter cannot do so. "I never had enough milk and my
kids thrived on formula." We`ve all visited homes where the grandmother is
hovering around making negative comments.
In our training we have to learn to be supportive and sensitive and
non-judgmental and deal with all the situations that mothers experience
during that vulnerable period."
And many of those issues are not learned in college-level physiology
lectures.
Wendy Blumfield
Prenatal Tutor/Prenatal Teacher/Breastfeeding Counsellor NCT
Haifa, Israel
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