IBCLC Detailed Content Outline: Clinical Skills Focused CERPs - Section VII

Perinatal professionals in hospitals have great influence over how much human milk a baby receives, as well as how encouraged parents feel related to pumping and initiating and maintaining their milk production and eventually meeting their infant feeding goals. When hospital staff help with pumping in the early hours, days, and weeks of a new and fragile baby’s life—especially when at breast, chest or body feeding isn’t possible—getting that professional support is likely to make a difference in the long-term health of that child as well as the health of their parent. Healthcare providers can facilitate milk collection and provision of it to babies and support parents with specific and updated guidance on pump choices, pump usage, flange fit and milk storage. Those who work in hospitals with families can make an important positive impact on long-term breastfeeding and human-milk feeding rates. This session will cover 12 simple ways (including the what, why, how, when and where of pumping) that healthcare providers can support parents who pump for their hospitalized baby.

Raynauds is an illusive condition that tends to be confused with other conditions, misdiagnosed, and consequently rarely treated--causing the breastfeeding dyad to suffer. This program provides a review of the symptoms, medical and lactation resources, and clinical applications that facilitate most the effective treatment/comfort for the patient.

Breastfeeding rates are exceptionally low in Lebanon. Only 40% of mothers exclusively breastfed through the first month and 2.4% continued to exclusively breastfeed between 4 and 5 months. In 2012, I developed, implemented and evaluated a pilot Breastfeeding Peer Counselor (BPC) Training Program in Beirut, Lebanon. I chose this format since BPCs are adaptable to local contexts and studies have shown that that improve rates of breastfeeding initiation, duration, and exclusivity in a variety of settings and across diverse populations.

The program successfully trained 8 BPCs and led directly to the establishment of the largest mother-to-mother peer breastfeeding online support network in the Middle East (over 11,000 members to date). This presentation will provide participants with the knowledge to develop, adapt, and implement their own BPC Training programs suited to their local context. In addition, this presentation will reflect upon ethical considerations of such programs and will offer guidance on the process of program evaluation. This will allow participants to identify their own program’s strengths and weaknesses, which can improve the effectiveness of subsequent organizations.

Research ethics institutions protect the rights, safety, dignity, and well-being of research participants, and also have a duty to ensure ‘good’ research. Conducting poor research is unethical, and there are many studies in the field of breastfeeding and lactation that have been challenged when published, simply because their findings and results are, at best, incorrect. Proper definitions, project design and industry conflict of interest are important factors, and these can be critiqued and challenged at the ethical review stage.

Participants will learn how to use the method of the '4 Ds of a Brief Assessment' to scrutinise the research questions, definitions of words used, disclosures and even the research methodology to decide if a study will have both scientific and ethical merit in the field of breastfeeding and lactation. If you are a donor, an applicant, a manager or a researcher you need to be aware of the process of ethical review of research protocols, the possibility of specialist review, and also of how to sift through published studies that have questionable study designs, and the findings.

Despite the many benefits of breastfeeding to both mothers and infants, the majority of women are unable to reach the recommendations of the World Health Organization of exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months of life and continued breastfeeding for two years or longer. It's important for health care professionals to stay up to date with the latest research to always ensure that the care they're providing is in line with current best evidence.

This presentation will present the results of a research review on the effectiveness of interventions to improve breastfeeding outcomes. A database search including PubMed, Cochrane, and CINAH were conducted to identify systematic review and meta-analysis studies in English that focused on breastfeeding interventions that addressed breastfeeding outcomes in full-term healthy newborns from 2012 to 2022. Learn more about the which breastfeeding interventions are backed by strong evidence, quality issues in certain studies, and the implications for further research.

Nighttime breastfeeding and proximate mother-infant sleep play a crucial role in sustaining lactation but present challenges for parents in settings where solitary infant sleep is the norm, and bedsharing is viewed as controversial and inherently dangerous. While separate parent-child sleep arrangements are a relatively recent cultural invention, they have become the dominant cultural norm, which also shapes medical infant sleep guidance in the U.S. and other similar settings. Recent breastfeeding promotion efforts, however, conflict with these cultural and medical imperatives for separate sleep. As more parents breastfeed, they find themselves falling asleep next to their babies. Some may fall asleep on unsafe surfaces in their attempt to avoid bedsharing, while others regularly bedshare in secret to avoid social stigma and other repercussions. To ensure both safety and wellbeing for infants and families, an integrated approach to nighttime breastfeeding and infant sleep will be recommended that incorporates evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives.

Rummaging in the tool bag: how we can borrow from other disciplines, and enhance our care.

As infant feeding specialists, we should be open to discovering new tools that renew our practice. Historically, we’ve incorporated elements from elsewhere, e.g. Active Listening (Rogers and Farson, 1957), borrowed from psychology and conflict resolution.

Changes to the UK support landscape, mean that parents may not access traditional breastfeeding peer support, and instead see health staff. A diversity of background, can mean staff bring additional skills that then complement those acquired under the UNICEF Baby Friendly standard.

For specialist professionals, such as IBCLCs, some of these tools can also complement practice, and can be used to great effect.

This presentation proposes to look at some elements we can borrow that enhance our clinical practice. We will review aspects of Active Listening, and then move on to examine elements in the Signs of Safety model and Solihull Approach. These are just two examples of widely practiced approaches in the UK, and there are many other fields to be borrowed from.

The roles of peer counselors (PC) in breastfeeding support is important to reach mothers and families in community as they would bridge the gaps within the warm chain of breastfeeding support. However, challenges has overcome in many forms, especially their reliability in providing breastfeeding support skills and knowledge. Malaysian Breastfeeding Peer Counselors (MBfPC) program has started in 2010 to enhance breastfeeding support for Malaysian community. Its training syllabus were adapted and modulated to be culturally acceptable. More than 500 PCs were trained.

The original syllabus was continuously being revised prior to each training since Malaysia is multicultural with great diversity, with few adaptations of new tools to enhance the understanding among the trainees whom majority are not health personnel. MBfPC Association (MBfPCA) is responsible to reliability queries by other parties, thus overseen the needs for MBfPC training reform. Three training levels were introduced in 2016; entrance, advanced, and train-of-trainers; to increase reliability of certified PC, even though the sustainability of the network is yet to be observed. The mechanisms used to select, train and certify the PCs had strengthened the roles and functional relevancy of MBfPCA existence in Malaysian scenario. This presentation will share the challenges and framework of capacity building among PCs to function as breastfeeding peer supporters in Malaysian context.

Home visits play an integral role in the practice of many Lactation Consultants around the world. There are undoubtedly many benefits to meeting our clients in their own space, and one of these is that we can immediately garner a wealth of valuable information within a very short period of time. Along with learning a variety of quick and easy ways to stealthily, respectfully gather vital information about important feeding practicalities, this presentation will explore mental health, cultural humility and personal safety. We will explore the array of clues and red flags that may unknowingly surround you with regard to the clients' mental health and their overall safety. Additionally, as someone who works with clientele from over 75 different countries, Johanna shares what she has learned regarding the variations and commonalities between cultures when it comes to performing home visits, and which behaviours we can adopt to ensure continued humility and respect.

Most lactation professionals love client interactions, but only send reports to health care providers out of a sense of duty. But writing and sending reports to our client’s health care providers can be more just an administrative task. Yes, it complies with IBLCE’s Code of Ethics to “Principle 4: Report accurately and completely to other members of the healthcare team” but it can also increase collaboration, improve client outcomes, and grow your practice.
This presentation seeks to reframe the process of writing and sending reports from a dreaded task to a clinical, ethical, and holistic way of supporting our clients while positively positioning ourselves as allied health professionals. Beyond the ethics (yes or no) and practicalities ("S.O.A.P." or not), a report to a health care provider is a source of communication about the consultation as well as marketing about your clinical skill, role in the client’s lactation experience, and lactation practice. With a combination of the why and how, this presentation outlines the ways in which reports to health care providers can be beneficial to the client, the health care provider, and the IBCLC, as well as devoting some time to specific strategies that lactation consultants can implement to streamline the process of sending reports so that we can get to the next client.