Dear Sue.  Good for you and your LC partner and the entire LC community of
Omaha for wanting your hospital to be a site for LC internships.  This is
exactly what has to happen if we are to really get going on solidifying our
professional training.  Professions are defined by their common training,
and all certificants of a profession are supposed to be competent to
practice in all settings.  I think that all our LC training programs should
be tied to teaching institutions so that student LCs, like student nurses,
student teachers, etc, would be mentored and supervised in their clinical
acquisition of skills.  There are challenges to be worked out:  for
instance, some of the basic LC skills (like latch technique) are still
inconsistently understood and taught, even by people currently working.
This is why someone needs to work out the heirarchy of skills, break them
down into units to be mastered, and create instructional programs that have
a systematic way of teaching the skills, allowing the student to practice
them, and then to test them in the end with the IBCLC exam after the student
completes a practicum.

The healthy baby can latch himself. Helping a mother latch a baby with
problems involves some of the same type of skills that swinging a golf club
or pruning a rose bush require.  It looks like you are just hauling off and
banging a ball or snipping a rose cane.  But the effortless swing requires
you understand something about physiology, something about physics,
something about hardware.  Pruning the rose bush requires you understand
something about timing, something about botany, something about design and
balance,and something about pests and disease.  So all these things that the
expert makes look so simple are in essense driven by a complex back-story of
sophisticated understanding blended with experience.  Watching the pro is
helpful, but the pro has to break it down so the student gets the
back-story.  This is how all education is geared, and we can do it for our
next generation of LCs rather than just throwing them out there sink or swim
to learn like most of  the rest of us did.  I applaud all the folks in all
the countries like Denise Fisher, the BSC folks, Linda Smith, Kay Hoover,
Jan Riordan, and all the teachers who came before for trying to bring the
profession along.  I wish Sue and the Omaha folks good luck.  You may be
pioneering something wonderful, and if this isn't being done elsewhere,
don't let that stop you.  But do try to move forward with some sort of plan
and keep notes and report back in a formal manner so your efforts benefit
others.

Barbara Wilson-Clay BSEd, IBCLC
Austin Lactation Associates
http://www.lactnews.com

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