Tricia,

I want to congratulate you on your very informative, detailed and well 
argued email. It gives those planning staff education good points to ponder, 
for the benefit of all - individual staff members and, ultimately, the 
mother and babies. How people use learning packages would be pretty typical, 
when the goal is more on getting a pass grade than on the process.

Virginia
in Brisbane, QLD, Australia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tricia Shamblin wrote;


> Dear Barbara,
> It's wonderful to hear that your hospital is considering training it's 
> staff. I think that all of us that work with breastfeeding mothers realize 
> that education is the key to meaningful change. I'm an IBCLC at a hospital 
> and recently we have begun a staff training program in an attempt to 
> become baby friendly. I have to say that the more that I have researched 
> this, the more that I'm convinced that the training must be an in-house 
> training program to realize any meaningful change. IMHO, online programs 
> just do not work. There is no way to learn how to help a women breastfeed 
> by watching an online program, they are a waste of time and money, even if 
> you have a motivated staff which you generally don't. You wouldn't want to 
> go to a doctor that went to medical school online, right? We are a small, 
> community hospital, near a very large hospital with a lot of money. They 
> started this process before us, but they are used an online program for 
> their nurses.
> Some of our nurses work at both hospitals. After they completed their 
> online training at the other hospital, I asked these nurses a few basic 
> questions and they were not able to answer any of them. Whats more, I 
> could tell that it didn't work because it didn't change any of their 
> practices. These nurses are the ones on the unit that were still heavily 
> pushing formula at every opportunity even after there online training. It 
> is really hard to get people in for training, but it can be done! I really 
> pushed for it, we have to do it or things will never change. I've asked 
> these nurses about their online training and every one of them has 
> admitted that they didn't read any of the information in these programs, 
> they just clicked through the pages as fast as possible and guessed on the 
> answers until they passed the test. Baby Friendly stresses that training 
> must be to the point of competency. This one of the reasons we have 
> decided not to accept any outside
> training, but all of our nurses must have our in-house training. I'm sorry 
> if I've offended by saying so, but I don't think that online programs 
> create nurses that are competent in helping mothers breastfeed. I can't 
> tell you the amount of complaining that went on when we announced that all 
> the nurses were coming in for mandatory 20 hours of training. I can tell 
> you that I was not very popular! But it has been such a wonderful 
> experience. Our nurses are becoming excited about helping mother's 
> breastfeed, they are beginning to understand the importance of human milk 
> for babies and maybe we should pause and offer education before just 
> handing over the bottle of formula. And the counseling skills are so 
> important! And the group discussions are invaluable. There is just no way 
> to replicate that with an online program. These nurses were so angry at me 
> at first, but I will tell you that at least 80% of them have come up to me 
> at some point and told me how
> much they are enjoying the classes and how much it is helping them with 
> their patients. They are looking forward to more training and excited 
> about the changes they see for their patients. I highly recommend getting 
> your staff in for an in-house training program.

             ***********************************************

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