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Tue, 11 May 1999 13:34:56 GMT |
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BfN The Breastfeeding Network |
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Barbara, you ask: "How does the Baby Friendly certification process know for
sure the facility
isn't just putting on a show?"
The BFI assessment team will interview women in the hospital. There will be a
certain number of women with vaginal deliveries, a certain number with
cesarians, a separate set of women whose babies are in special care and women
who are receiving ante-natal care from the facility.
They will also ask about things like any breastfeeding baby receiving a formula
supplement in the previous 24 hours -- what was the medical justification (the
team will then discuss if this sounds jsutifiable in their opinion), how was
parental consent obtained.
At least, this is the pattern in Britain and my understanding is that this is
international. In the UK lay breastfeeding support people are often on the
assessment team -- when I have been on an assessment, my main piece of work has
been to do mother interviews.
The UK assessors always choose the women to interview (so staff can't steer
interviewers to the 'best' women) -- and remember that BFI is about care for
*all* mothers and babies, so women who are bottle feeding are also interviewed
-- can be of interest to see if they get skin-to-skin care, adequate antenatal
info, etc.
In my experience teams get some pretty interesting info pretty quickly....one
thing is -- where the facility really doesn't understand what real Baby Friendly
practice is, they won't know what to pretend about/cover up ;-)
Perhaps it would be helpful to you to get whatever documentation is available in
the US from the US BFI office. I wouldn't say BFI is perfect, but the whole
assessment proceedure has been around for a while, whatever the assessors see --
it isn't likely to be the first time it has been seen and dealt with.
Magda Sachs
Breastfeeding Supporter, BfN, UK
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