This guide is designed to help faculty assess breastfeeding rates within a hospital and can be done as a pre and post data collection to verify the effectiveness of implementing this curriculum. First collect a baseline level of breastfeeding within your hospital. Do this data collection every few months or annually to verify the breastfeeding curriculum is creating a positive change within your practice.

  • Collect Pre-Intervention/Baseline Data: Conduct a cross-sectional chart review of at least 100 charts at discharge.
    • Include only healthy infants greater than 37 weeks of gestation. Healthy is defined as infants in the term nursery and no contraindications for breastfeeding.
    • Record method of infant feeding.
      • Exclusive breastfeeding (infant consumes only human milk except for vitamins, minerals, and medications. No water, juice, or non-human milk).
      • Combination feeding (human milk and formula and/or solids).
      • Exclusive formula feeding.
      • Other feeding or unknown.
    • Collect information that may alert you to any health disparities that may exist in your community such as Employment Status, Education Level, Neighborhood of Residence, Socioeconomic Status, and/or Race. This can help you target interventions.
  • Collect Post Intervention Data: Conduct a second cross-sectional chart review of at least 100 6-month-well-newborn visit charts using the same data collection described above.
    • Even if the visit was at 9-months, there should be a record of how the infant was feeding at 6-months. This can be the exact same 100 charts pulled for baseline to follow how that cohort is doing or 100 randomly pulled charts.
  • This data will give you your sites overall breastfeeding rates (combination + exclusive) at discharge and at the 6-month-well-newborn visit. Overall breastfeeding is defined as those infants that are fed exclusively breast milk plus those infants that are breastfed but also receive some type of supplemental nutrition (infant formula, rice, etc.), in other words, it is the sum of the combination rate plus the exclusive breastfeeding rate. Use this data to
    • Look at how your institution is doing in terms of exclusive breastfeeding.
    • Look at how your institution is doing in terms of possible disparities and consider targeting interventions towards the groups with the lowest rates.