Gearing to success with national breastfeeding programmes: The Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly (BBF) initiative experience

Abstract

Evidence-based policy toolboxes are essential for decision makers to effectively invest in and scale up maternal-child health and nutrition programs, and breastfeeding is no exception. This special issue focuses on the experiences implementing the Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly (BBF) toolbox in England, Scotland, and Wales.BBF is an initiative that includes a toolbox for decision making based on the Complex Adaptive System-based Breastfeeding Gear Model. The BBF initiative experience in Great Britain presented in this special issue illustrates how versatile BBF is as it can be readily adapted to the specific application context. In this instance one country, England was trained by the Yale School of Public Health team that developed BBF.

Countries' experiences scaling up national breastfeeding, protection, promotion and support programmes: Comparative case studies analysis

“…With regard to maternal employment, according to the ILO, female employees have been eligible for paid maternity leave of 12 weeks with full pay since 2009 (ILO, 2017). In the implementation research area, the Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly (BBF) Toolbox has been applied in Mexico three times since 2016 (Pérez‐Escamilla et al, 2022). Briefly, BBF is based on metrics to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the different components of the BFGM (Pérez‐Escamilla et al, 2012) to assess the country's readiness to scale up and make the corresponding evidence‐informed policy recommendations to enable the BF environment (González de Cosío et al, 2018).…”

What are the needs and challenges of breastfed medically complex infants and children in the paediatric setting?

“…Breastfeeding rates in the UK are some of the lowest in the world (Victora et al, 2016), with many women stopping breastfeeding before they are ready (McAndrew et al, 2012). There are numerous reasons for the reduction in exclusivity and duration of breastfeeding, including a lack of translation of key information to practice (Pérez-Escamilla et al, 2022) and lack of prompt support that is attuned to the different stages of lactation and associated challenges (Fraser et al, 2020).…”