Jay,

Loved your post, and agree with you completely.  I think having a position in
a hospital, clinic, or private practice as a lactation assistant would be a
great place for LC Wannabes to get lots of supervised experience and better
prepare them to be IBCLCs.  However, (soapbox, beware) and I will say it
again, completing an educational program does not make one "certified."  I
think it is imperative to hold up the standards of NOCA (the national
organization of Certifying Agencies -- I may have the exact title wrong) and
not confer "certification" on people who have completed an educational
program, no matter how good the educational program is.  I'm not knocking the
educational programs, but I firmly believe that certification is the province
of the exam board; in our case, the IBLCE, in the case of maternal-child
health it is the National Certification Corporation (NCC) and so on.  It is
not the educational program that confers certification.  The people that run
the ed. programs do not have the means to recertify, nor do they have the
ability to police those that complete their programs that do not maintain
appropriate ethical standards.

In March of '93 when ILCA determined that "....ILCA acknowledges the IBLCE
examination as the professional credential for lactation consultants" BSC
dropped their CLC title for their graduates, despite the fact that BSC
students completed over 300 hours of education through their exclusive home
study program.  Once a student successfully completes the BSC program, they
are "graduate LCs" and the next step is to sit for the exam.  (end soapbox)

All this to say though, that the idea of lactation assistants is very
appealing -- many graduate LCs of many educational programs have difficulty
obtaining the required number of practice hours -- a minimum of 2500 with a
bachelor's degree -- and this would be one way to do it.

The next question is, how do we organize it?  Or do we?

Jan B.  who thinks the idea is great, but needs some help with the
logistics...