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 *********************************************** The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html