S.A. van Dellen
The effect of a breastfeeding support programme on breastfeeding duration and exclusivity: a quasi-experiment
van Dellen, S.A.; Wisse, B; Mobach, M.P.; Dijkstra, A.
Authors
B Wisse
M.P. Mobach
A. Dijkstra
Abstract
Background Breastfeeding has important positive long-term health consequences for infants and mothers. The World Health Organization recommends that all infants should be exclusively breastfed for six months or longer, and advises continuation of breastfeeding for two years or beyond. However, these recommendations are not met in many countries. This study examined whether a comprehensive, evidence-based breastfeeding intervention, the Breastfeeding Support Programme (BSP), promotes prolonged duration and exclusivity of breastfeeding among its participants. Methods A quasi-experimental design was used to compare breastfeeding duration and exclusivity in the BSP group (N = 66) to breastfeeding duration and exclusivity in a control group (N = 72). Participants who followed the BSP were provided with 6 consults delivered by a lactation consultant. The consults started during pregnancy and continued up until 10 weeks after delivery. Participants in the control group did not follow the BSP. Pretest and posttest questionnaires were administered through the internet. A Cox proportional hazards regression analysis was used to estimate adjusted hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for cessation of any and exclusive breastfeeding, while controlling for differences at baseline. Results The effect of the BSP on survival rates for any and exclusive breastfeeding were significant while controlling for differences between the two groups at baseline (respectively HR = 0.34, p < .001 [95% CI = 0.18–0.61] and HR = 0.46, p < .001 [95% CI = 0.29–0.72]). Among mothers in the BSP group there was on average 66% less risk of cessation of any breastfeeding and on average 54% less risk of cessation of exclusive breastfeeding at any point in time compared to those in the control group. Conclusions The BSP appears to be an effective means to delay cessation of any and exclusive breastfeeding cessation and therefore to increase breastfeeding duration and exclusivity. This is an important finding, because earlier cessation of breastfeeding than desired is a common problem in many countries. Future research into the effectiveness of the BSP could consider random assignment to conditions and test the effectiveness of the intervention in other populations to investigate further whether wide-scale implementation of this intervention could be useful to promote breastfeeding.
Citation
van Dellen, S., Wisse, B., Mobach, M., & Dijkstra, A. (2019). The effect of a breastfeeding support programme on breastfeeding duration and exclusivity: a quasi-experiment. BMC Public Health, 19, Article 993. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7331-y
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jul 16, 2019 |
Online Publication Date | Jul 24, 2019 |
Publication Date | Jul 24, 2019 |
Deposit Date | Jul 29, 2019 |
Publicly Available Date | Jul 30, 2019 |
Journal | BMC Public Health |
Publisher | BioMed Central |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 19 |
Article Number | 993 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7331-y |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1291578 |
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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
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