Breastfeeding on the agenda across the borders

Background: Breastfeeding is one of the most effective interventions to improve child and maternal health. Breastfeeding results in lower child mortality rates when compared with no breastfeeding and there is a sustained intervention effect on health outcomes with longer duration. Unfortunately breastfeeding it is no longer the norm in the vast majority of countries and in high income countries breastfeeding duration is very short. The World Health Organization (WHO) is aiming to increase breastfeeding to at least 50% by 2025.

Objective: This study aims to merge the experience from breastfeeding women, health visitors and the communication style of motivational interviewing in order to develop a method to support women in breastfeeding for 6 month or longer

Methods: The research design has been inspired by Participatory Design (PD) with the purpose of designing a bespoke platform for support and communication between breastfeeding women and Health Visitors (HVs). Training in motivational interviewing (MI) will be developed and provided to HVs followed by assessment of the HVs using the Motivational Interviewing Integrity coding (MITI) scale, a quantitative tool that measures clinical skill in MI. The study will take place in two sites with three phases in each part. One site in the UK and one in Denmark – both representing different parts of Europe, and their national healthcare system. This proposal is a contribution to international research on breastfeeding and communication, especially in public healthcare, social policy making and sociology, where attention is focused on well being and the target of enhancing breastfeeding rates. This proposal also contributes to the research tradition of public health where the focus is on providing new knowledge on improving the health of the public in general and reduce inequalities.