Every Step of the Way: National Breastfeeding Month

August is National Breastfeeding Month and begins with the collective, world-wide celebration of World Breastfeeding Week (August 1-7).

World Breastfeeding Week was celebrated for the first time in 1992, in honor of the signing of the Innocenti Declaration of 1990.  The Innocenti Declaration was a short, two-page document with an enormous cooperative scope and vision for the future and provided the foundational framework for our present-day successes.  In 2011, the USBC (United States Breastfeeding Committee) declared August National Breastfeeding Month, with a goal of providing all families with the opportunity for support for human milk feeding.  Each year since, the committee has chosen a unique theme to focus the celebration; this year it is “Every Step of the Way.”  Indeed, Every Step of the Way, progress has built on the tireless work of generations of advocate parents, health care providers, lactation specialists, physicians and surgeons’ generals to support human milk feeding as a public health goal. (Table 1).  

So here we are, August 2021, considering together what World Breastfeeding Week and National Breastfeeding Month mean to the health care system in Ohio, and to pediatricians in particular.  Every Step of the Way is a proposal full of optimism.  Incredible strides in the initiation of human milk feeding have been made in the maternity world, with systems increasingly streamlined to provide a consistent standard of early skin-to-skin care, rooming in, and support for the recognition of and active interventions for barriers to early human milk feeding.  Most Ohio hospitals, in fact 89% of them, participate in the 5-star, breastfeeding designation program First Steps for Healthy Babies.  Voluntary partnership with the Ohio Hospital Association and Ohio Department of Health in this statewide initiative provides a structured approach to lactation support.  The result is that as many as 80% of dyads in Ohio now leave the hospital receiving human milk, with those families looking to their pediatricians for specific advice and ongoing systems intended to protect and maintain their early success.   Delivery ward nurses and lactation specialists are no longer tasked with carrying the entire scope of education and assistance alone; parents expect to be able to receive best practices and advice from a broad range of care options, especially their health care team.  The optimism of Every Step of the Way is the intent to link a warm chain of resources, with a vision that a diverse and comprehensive network (young people, family, academicians, policy makers, politicians, employers, peer supporters, dietitians, lactation consultants, nurses, midwives, obstetricians, and pediatricians) collaborate over the first 1000 days of an infant’s life to support parents and provide real solutions to the feeding challenges they may face.

Looking for ways to join the warm chain in a more formal way?  Need resources to back up your practice?  Check out the links below. (Table 2).

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