IBCLC Detailed Content Outline: Clinical Skills / Education and Communication Focused CERPs - Section VII B

Lactation support may be time-limited when caring for multiple families with varying degrees of complexity and needs. Prioritizing between parents and within the individual cases, employing critical thinking skills, and identifying the chest/breastfeeding family’s needs is essential to efficient workflow. Competing priorities can be stressful and draining. Mindfulness empowers those providing care the clarity to prioritize needs and increase satisfaction for both family and lactation support team.

The presentation will consist of actual lactation scenarios varying in complexity and diverse work environments. Participants will interact via the chat box to triage cases, rank interventions and create a collaborative discipline list. We will end with a brief mindful activity.

American culture values self-sufficiency and celebrates self-sacrifice in the name of success. The idea of community and communal living is fast becoming a thing of the past. Children graduate, go off to college, start careers and families seldom looking back. Moving back home or moving back to one’s old neighborhood is now unheard of. The result has been the rise of the nuclear family and the fall of the generational knowledge that supported breastfeeding and identified new moms at risk of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.

This talk will explore the importance of restoring and improving community and peer breastfeeding support and identifying barriers to success. Lactation providers will learn how to identify importance and the role extended family and how to include them without violating our patients privacy. Attendees will gain insight on health disparities and the historical significance of breastfeeding in communities of colors. Last but not least, the talk will highlight the importance of providing culturally sensitive and appropriate care.

Breastfeeding facilitates good health in infants and mothers, and for all humans throughout life. Medical professionals should be advocates for breastfeeding, and physicians could be one of the most influential advocates. However, many medical students, residents and physicians have very limited opportunities to learn about breastfeeding and human lactation during their medical education. From another point of view, breastfeeding is a private experience as well as a scientific matter. If a physician or a partner successfully breastfeeds, she/he may become a more effective advocate for breastfeeding. So, it is imperative to provide medical students, residents, and young physicians with education about breastfeeding and to enable them to experience successful breastfeeding personally, in order for them to promote and support breastfeeding among their patients.

The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine is an international organization of physicians who protect, promote, and support breastfeeding, and one of its goals is to develop and disseminate the standard for physician education around breastfeeding and human lactation. ABM has developed protocols and statements for health care providers to utilize for breastfeeding management.

The WHO/UNICEF revised Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding in 2018, includes in Step2 “Ensure that staff have sufficient knowledge, competence and skills to support breastfeeding”. This included physician education. There are many ways to educate physicians, and ABM materials could be one option.

Many of us come to work in breastfeeding envisioning a world where mothers and babies can breastfeed without barriers; however, we quickly learn that breastfeeding challenges go beyond latching and positioning.

To effectively support a breastfeeding/chestfeeding family, we have to support the parents, the extended family, the primary care provider, the workplace culture, the childcare, and the community; in summary, supporting one dyad can be an intervention to the whole social system. Indeed, breastfeeding advocacy is about building systems and consistently leading cultural changes to more deeply reinforce human feeding as the norm.

Kouzes and Posner (2012) state: “if you want to have a significant impact on people, on organizations, and oncommunities, you’d be wise to invest in learning the behaviors that enable you to become the very best leader you can.” With that in mind, lactation consultants and lactation advocates would benefit by learning leadership behaviors and skills that will support their efforts towards cultural change, inspire shared visions, challenge processes, becoming strategic advisors, and leading from the inside out.

Lactation leaders would benefit by being able to align values and beliefs with actions and strategies to promote breastfeeding as part of whole community development and as a public health strategy. In that way, lactation has a presence in early childhood initiatives, maternal and infant health, mental health programs, and any health, social, educational intervention. Want to normalize lactation? Join this interactive session and become the leader who can make extraordinary lactation things happen in your community.

Fed is Best is a foundation with a major social media presence who seek to warn parents and practitioners about the dangers of insufficient exclusive breastfeeding. Through their social media campaigns that have galvanized a backlash against exclusive breastfeeding, lactation care providers, and the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative. Although lactation specialists disagree with much of their content, they have raised awareness about mothers who do fall through the cracks of our care system and may suffer as a result. The steep drop-off in rates of exclusive breastfeeding is an indication of this. This presentation will examine three provider-level barriers that negatively impact breastfeeding and what we can do to improve care so that mothers will reach their breastfeeding goals.

Muchos de nosotros comenzamos a trabajar en lactancia visualizando un mundo donde las madres y los bebés pueden amamantar sin barreras; sin embargo, aprendemos rápidamente que los desafíos de la lactancia materna van más allá del prendimiento y el posicionamiento.

Para apoyar efectivamente a una familia que amamanta, debemos apoyar a los padres, a la familia extendida, al doctor, a la cultura del lugar de trabajo, a la guardería y a la comunidad; en resumen, apoyar a una familia se transforma en la oportunidad para afectar todo el sistema social. De hecho, promover la lactancia se trata de construir sistemas y liderar cambios culturales para reforzar más profundamente la alimentación con leche humana como la norma.

Kouzes y Posner (2012) afirman: "si desea tener un impacto significativo en las personas, en las organizaciones y en las comunidades, lo más recomendable sería invertir en aprender comportamientos que le permitan convertirse en el mejor líder que pueda ser". Con esto en mente, los consultores y asesores de lactancia se beneficiarían aprendiendo conductas de liderazgo y habilidades que apoyarán sus esfuerzos hacia el cambio cultural, inspirarán visiones compartidas, desafiarán procesos, se convertirán en asesores estratégicos y liderarán desde adentro hacia afuera.

Los líderes en el mundo de la lactancia se beneficiarían de poder alinear valores y motivaciones con acciones y estrategias para promover la lactancia como parte del desarrollo de toda la comunidad y como una estrategia de salud pública. De esta forma, la lactancia tiene presencia en las iniciativas para la primera infancia, la salud materna e infantil, los programas de salud mental y cualquier intervención sanitaria, social y educativa.

¿Quiere normalizar la lactancia? Participe de esta presentación y aprenda a liderar iniciativas de lactancia extraordinarias en su comunidad.

Millennial parents live and learn on social media. Yet, much of the information available online, even through lactation “support” groups, is outdated, inaccurate, and counterproductive. Millennial parents, particularly mothers, also place pressure on themselves to get parenting “right,” which leads to a complex and dangerous blend of anxiety, guilt, and fear surrounding all of their parenting decisions. Facebook closed groups can be an effective platform for creating a virtual breastfeeding support group, but just as in real life, the groups must be properly facilitated. This presentation offers step by step guidance to creating, setting up, and maintaining a Facebook breastfeeding support group. We’ll deconstruct common controversies that occur within social media, and analyze conflict management strategies to create safe spaces online.

The language and practices of health professionals can impact upon how a woman feels about breastfeeding and her breastfeeding baby. This presentation will report on the observed, and audio recorded, language used by health professionals during the early establishment phase of breastfeeding. Much of the language positioned breastfeeding as the mechanical production of nutritious fluid rather than a relational interaction between mother and baby. At times the infant was positioned as an antagonistic being with the capacity to ‘think and decide’ whether to cooperate with breastfeeding. An alternative discourse emerged from a more relationship-focused approach to breastfeeding support. This presentation will report on projects which have included the observation of interactions between breastfeeding women and midwives, and/or lactation consultants and/or trained breastfeeding peer supporters. Exemplars of best practice for health professionals, and peer supporters, who provide breastfeeding support during the early establishment of breastfeeding, will be provided.

As lactation professionals and supporters, we will encounter LGBTQIA+ and gender non-conforming families in health care settings, private visits and support groups. Deepen your knowledge of the unique needs of queer, trans and gender-non conforming parents during lactation. This session allows participants to explore our awareness, ask questions in a safe space and develop the tools to meet all families where they are.

When a breastfeeding mother consults because of chronic, deep breast pain, we feel weak at the knees. Often these mothers have been to several specialists and nothing has worked for them. Is it mastitis? Thrush? Referred pain from an inadequate latch? Emotional issues? Or is it all of the above, and even more? In this presentation we will learn to do an in-depth clinical history and to use an holistic model for a systematic management of chronic breast pain, so we can offer these mothers more efficient solutions – and better counselling.