I have really enjoyed reading most of the posts regarding meeting with artificial baby milk company marketing personnel. I have found them very insightful!  I thought that I would add something about the educational implications of meetings between health care providers and sales people. 
 
We should name the people who come to promote products, appropriately. This might help us and the supervisors who insist that their staff attend promotional meetings, understand the purpose of these meetings. They are marketing personnel, product promoters,salespeople, and similar. Let's call them that.
 
The aim of salespeople is to sell a product. They hold on to this aim even when the promotion of the product might  interfere with health. Do you think that a company would  continue to employ a salesperson who helps hospitals reduce the use of their product? 
 
The real aim of marketing personnel is often cleverly disguised by ensuring that the background of the seller matches the context of the target market. In this case salespeople who sell health related products, often have backgrounds in health related fields. Their backgrounds are emphasized as a means of not only masking the real aims of the salesperson but also to create a sense of solidarity with the health care profession, a  facade of science and to justify selling their product.

Remind your supervisors of this fact. Perhaps ask them what they think the aims of a real estate agent, for example, who has a background in medicine, are when they are trying to sell a house. Is the agent aiming to get the best business deal or they going to focus on the health needs of the customer? 
 
Let's also call the meetings with the salespeople by their real name. They are not in-services or educational sessions, they are advertising sessions. The aim of the meeting is not to facilitate practices that promote health rather to convince the audience to use the product. 

Many have listed reasons to be careful at these meetings.   I fully agree that the marketing personnel might use our words to promote their product and thus, we should watch what we say. In addition, we should ensure that our actions are also not used to promote sales. Accordingly, think about the message that is conveyed when we meet with salespeople. 

Remember, that we not only educate through words but also through our actions. The act of meeting with salespeople indicates that their product is important enough to us that we take time out of our very busy schedule to learn more about it, rather than say, helping a few more moms. Our apparent interest in the product suggests that it must be connected to the work that we have been hired to do and that artificial baby milk and nursing are affiliated with one another. 

This message becomes even stronger when the staff note and compare with whom we do or do not meet. For example, they probably notice that we also meet with the salespeople from breastpump companies and understand that there is a connection to breastfeeding. Yet, they are likely also aware that lactation consultants do not attend meetings with sales people who market other products in the hospital. For example, how many of us attend meetings with salespeople from companies who provide furniture, bedding, soap, paper and sanitary products etc.? Our clients use these products, they are integral to the experience in hospital and one might argue that the quality of these products might have an impact on the breastfeeding. Yet, I doubt that most lactation consultants meet with these salespeople. Of course not, we do not have enough time and they are not directly related to our work......   What do you think that tells those whom we are trying to educate? 

By meeting with the company salespeople we unwillingly assist the companies in promoting their product by proliferating the equivalency position, a marketing tool which poses artificial baby milk and breastfeeding as two equal products. Hence, it seems that regardless of the words that we do or do not utter during meetings with salespeople, our mere presence has already validated the product in a way that could never have been achieved by words alone.

Keren Epstein-Gilboa MEd BScN RN FACCE LCCE IBCLC 
PhD (Candidate) 

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