World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated the first week of August every year and represents a global celebration of breastfeeding efforts. It is a global campaign to raise awareness and promote action related to supporting breastfeeding.
The theme of this year’s campaign is “Protect Breastfeeding: A Shared Responsibility.” The Klickitat County Health Department is acting to help provide support for breastfeeding families. The benefits of breastfeeding are seen in the health and wellbeing for infants, children and birth parents. In the Columbia Gorge, the awareness for the need of resources for pregnant and postpartum families is growing and in response we are slowly starting to see some of these resources become available.
The Klickitat County Health Department is working on restarting a peer counselor breastfeeding program or peer support program. This program, called “Loving Support Makes Breastfeeding Work” (Loving Support), is the United States Department of Agriculture’s national breastfeeding promotion and support campaign, serving as the foundation for breastfeeding education, counseling, and promotion efforts in the Women, Infant, and Children Nutrition (WIC) program. Many studies have been done in understanding the benefits of breastfeeding as well as the benefits of using peer support to help mothers to reach their infant feeding goals.
One such study showed, “Mothers who accepted breastfeeding peer counseling referrals and had at least one phone conversation or in-person contact had a significant 35% to 164% increased odds of positive breastfeeding outcomes” (www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1499404619301319).
This summer, the health department will be hiring for a peer counseling breastfeeding program. The peer support person will have lived experience in both breastfeeding as well as ideally a person who is or has been on WIC. This person will be in help current WIC participants who have agreed to participate and will provide basic breastfeeding information and encouragement to these families.
Not only will the health department provide peer support, but they also have an Internationally Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) on staff to provide care for more complex breastfeeding needs. There are many things that make it hard to breastfeeding, one of which being difficulty in getting support. By getting the peer support program started, the health department hopes to eliminate some of the difficulties in getting care. We are proud of our WIC program which helps families who qualify to pay for healthy foods and so much more. The WIC website states that, “Almost half of all babies in the state of Washington are on WIC.”
If you have any interest in applying for the peer counseling position or are interested in finding out more about WIC, contact Anna Coughlin at the Klickitat County Health Department, 509-250-0824.
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