Hospital's Experience
The Breastfeeding Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) by the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India (BPNI) is a wonderful opportunity to educate and motivate doctors and nurses involved in the care of mothers and infants to step up and follow the guidelines of the IYCF & GOI, MAA Programme.
AFMC Pune & CH (SC) Pune have always been at the forefront of quality medical education, patient care and research in the Armed Forces Medical Services.
The BFHI Certification in August 2022 is a landmark achievement for us and a benchmark for all future initiatives to actively promote and sustain exclusive breastfeeding.
Command Hospital (Southern Command) - Armed Forces Medical College
At the outset I would like thank the BPNI for granting the Breastfeeding Friendly Hospital accreditation to Makunda hospital. This hospital has been offering high quality perinatal care at heavily subsidized price for more than 25 years. The main focus of Makunda hospital has been the poor and downtrodden people living in and around this region. We thought of applying for this accreditation as Obstetrics and Pediatrics are among the most important departments in our hospital and we deal with significant number of mother and babies. The hospital has been handling an average of 500 - 600 deliveries and a little over 100 Nicu admissions every month.
Preparing for this accreditation helped us in various ways in the perinatal care space and I am listing few important points here:
- The first and foremost is training of the staffs including doctors involved in Mother and child health. As we all know, the concept of Breastfeeding, lactation and other aspects of IYCF are not given much importance in our undergraduate curriculum, be it MBBS or Nursing. So, the training plays an important role in protecting Breastfeeding, so as to reap the long term benefits of exclusive Breastfeeding. Once we started the process for accreditation, we made a curriculum and made sure all the nurses and doctors working in obstetrics and Pediatrics department undergo the training. There were post tests following each module and we had a 12 module course. This helped in enlightening the advantages of breastfeeding and made them learn the proper techniques of breastfeeding. I am sure this will go a long way in reducing neonatal and infant mortality in addition to other benefits like decreasing the risk of malnutrition, anemia and under five mortality, as these were proven beyond doubt in several studies in the past. This plays a paramount role because Karimganj district, where the hospital is located is known for its poor health indices viz NMR, IMR and U5MR.
- The second area which got strengthened with this accreditation process is the documentation and monitoring of IYCF indicators. Although the Paediatric department has been functioning, we were not documenting the critical IYCF indicators. These are very essential data and we could strengthen the hospital database by adding the IYCF indicators into it and by starting to monitor it regularly.
- The third point is about Antenatal counselling of pregnant mothers about the breastfeeding and it’s benefits. We started playing videos on this topic in the antenatal care opd. In addition to this, counselling of mothers and breast examination got added into the antenatal checklist.
- The fourth point and the foremost point is about the IMS act and it’s implications. Predominant staff including medical officers were totally ignorant about the IMS act and preparing for this accreditation helped us to increase the awareness about IMS act among our healthcare workers.
Dr. Shajin, Makunda Christian Leprosy And General Hospital, Assam