What is an infant feeding support group?

At Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, we support several Infant Feeding Support groups across Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. These groups play a pivotal role in providing parents with the necessary advice and guidance they need on breastfeeding.

They are run by a team of trained volunteers dedicated to supporting and promoting breastfeeding and safe formula feeding practices in line within the UNICEF baby friendly initiative.

The team support families and babies who are experiencing infant feeding problems requiring more intensive or specialist support. The aim of this service is to ensure every child gets the best start in life.

What can the support group help with?

·      Difficulty with positioning and attachment and breast refusal

·      Low breast milk supply

·      Sore nipples and other breast problems

·      Slow weight gain

·      Inducing lactation or re-lactation

·      Support with extending the breastfeeding journey

Research demonstrates that supporting breastfeeding and increasing breastfeeding rates, reduces health inequalities, improves long term physical and emotional health in families and is a high impact area within the current Healthy Child Programme (2017, revised 2021).

Breast milk provides all the nutrients a baby needs for healthy growth and development for the first six months of life and beyond. Breastfeeding also has numerous health benefits for both mother and baby including.

·      Reducing the risk of childhood obesity by up to 25%.

·      Protecting babies from life-threatening illnesses; risk of sudden infant death syndrome is lowered by 45-73%. (Breastfeeding and Health Outcomes for the mother and baby dyad. Paediatric clinics of North America 2013)

·      Lower the risk of breast cancer is lowered by 4.3%. (Collaborative Group on Hormonal Factors in Breast Cancer. Lancet 2002)

By providing infant feeding sessions, we can help increase the rate of mothers who breastfeed during the first six to eight weeks of their babies life (UK rate 48% mothers breastfeeding vs Sweden,84% ) The wider impact is that by increasing breastfeeding rates to 40% at  four months would save the NHS 40 million pounds per year (Lancet, 2016)

We need your support

To carry out these sessions, we need funding to enable us to train new peer supporters to help give guidance on breastfeeding, refreshments for those attending the sessions and promotional materials to help raise awareness of these groups.  We rely on donations to help us continue to offer these vital sessions to local parents.

Donate now