Improving Exclusive Breastmilk Feeding to Meet National Guidelines

Breastfeeding has long been held as the feeding method of choice offering advantages to both mother and infant. The World Health Organization and others have supported breastfeeding as the optimal source of nutrition for the... [ view full abstract ]

Breastfeeding has long been held as the feeding method of choice offering advantages to both mother and infant. The World Health Organization and others have supported breastfeeding as the optimal source of nutrition for the newborn infant and recommend the exclusivity of breastmilk for the first six months of life. Recent data in the United States shows that less than 50% of newborns were still breastfeeding at 6 months of life. Evidence based national perinatal core measures have been established to encourage hospitals to utilize the performance improvement process to better those numbers. Yale – New Haven Hospital is a large, inner city academic medical center in southern New England with a current rate of exclusive breastmilk feeding at 55.88%. In the fall of 2014 a multidisciplinary, core committee assembled to focus improvement efforts in this area around the themes of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Triple Aim: Better Health, Better Healthcare, Better Value. The aim is to improve the experience of exclusive breastmilk feeding considering the mother’s choice within the Women’s service line. Organizational challenges to exclusive breastmilk feeding include non-evidence based care practices, caregiver mindset and availability of lactation consultants. The breastfeeding experience is far reaching but for this project the process is centered on the birth hospital stay. By utilizing small cycles of change and the Plan-Do-Study-Act model, the team expects to increase exclusive breastmilk feeding by 5% within one year of intervention implementation. The current microsystem assessment will enable prioritization of interventions to improve breastmilk feeding outcomes. This project is currently underway and the poster will detail methodologies, metrics and interventions from this first phase. The successful outcomes of this evidence based project will serve as a model for the other delivery networks of this multisite health system.