Heartbeat: Neonatal awarded Unicef Baby Friendly accreditation

September 29, 2021

Our organisation strives to deliver excellent quality of care for our patients, young and old, and the neonatal team have done just that by achieving the first stage of Baby Friendly accreditation. Following in the footsteps of maternity services who hold full accreditation, neonatal are at the start of their journey with plans to keep going.

Unicef Baby Friendly accreditation is a globally recognised quality improvement programme to provide parents with the best possible care to build close and loving relationships with their baby and to feed their baby in ways which will support optimum health and development. The accreditation is implemented in stages over a number of years. At each stage organisations are externally assessed by Unicef UK. When all the stages are passed they are accredited as Baby Friendly.

Baby Friendly accreditation is part of the NHS long term plan ensuring everyone gets the best start in life. The award can be achieved for neonatal, maternity, health visiting and children’s centre services and will soon be available for children’s wards too.

Stage one involves building a firm foundation. This stage was led by Carmen Nuttall, Infant Feeding Lead for NNU and Louise Thompson, Infant Feeding Coordinator with huge support from the neonatal nursing and medical team.

Louise explains how the team achieved this, she said: “We ensured our policies and guidelines support baby friendly standards and we developed a training programme to allow colleagues to implement the standards according to their role.

“We demonstrated how we have processes for implementing, auditing and evaluating the standards and also ensure that there is no promotion of breastmilk substitutes, bottles, teats or dummies in any part of the facility or by any colleagues.

The team also have plans to keep going and achieve accreditation for the next stage. Carmen added: “BFI accreditation is an ongoing process; we have two years from stage one accreditation to achieve the next stage. Stage two involves ensuring at least 80 per cent of colleagues have received training and department colleagues and managers will be interviewed to ensure they understand and meet the baby friendly standards to provide the best care.”

Dr Sivakumar, Neonatal Clinical Director, said: “I sincerely thank the hard work and the commitment of our neonatal colleagues and our infant feeding team which helped us to achieve stage one Baby Friendly accreditation. This is a reflection of how well the baby and family friendly principles are embedded in each and every member of our team. We look forward to our amazing journey towards further stages of BFI accreditation.”