By Department of Health (2014)
Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage (EYFS), which comes into force on 1 September 2014.
Category: Infant Feeding
By NHS England (2014)
This collection reports on the number and proportion of women seen and assessed by a healthcare professional within 12 weeks and 6 days of their maternity, the number and proportion of mothers’ who have initiated or not initiated breastfeeding and the number and proportion of infants who have been fully, partially or not at all breastfed at 6-8 weeks
Categories
Accident Prevention Alcohol Cancer Care of the Elderly Community Safety CVD CYP Healthcare Health Protection (Emergency planning Healthy Child including NCMP & CDO Healthy Settings Infant Feeding Infant Mortality Infection Control Library Liver Disease including NHS Health Checks Long-Term Conditions Mortality Nutrition Obesity Respiratory Disease seasonal mortality) Tobacco & Drugs
Annual report of the Chief Medical Officer on the state of the public's health: Surveillance Volume, 2012
By Department of Health (2014)
As well as presenting data and evidence, the report also comments on overarching trends. This year, information in the report suggests that we may need to rethink what is regarded as ‘normal’ in relation to our health and our society. Some of the main themes discussed in the report are obesity, national data on blindness and deafness and active travel.
Categories
Accident Prevention Alcohol Cancer Care of the Elderly Community Safety CVD CYP Healthcare Health Protection (Emergency planning Healthy Child including NCMP & CDO Healthy Settings Infant Feeding Infant Mortality Infection Control Library Liver Disease including NHS Health Checks Long-Term Conditions Mortality Nutrition Obesity Respiratory Disease seasonal mortality) Tobacco & Drugs
The future of public health: a horizon scan
By RAND Europe (2014)
Public Health England (PHE) commissioned RAND Europe to undertake a horizon scanning study exploring the future of public health and related scientific services. This work was intended to help inform thinking at the strategic level within PHE, firstly in relation to the wider vision of the Agency and, secondly, in relation to the proposals for the creation of an integrated public health science hub. The report focuses on the different future public health science needs and the extent to which an integrated science hub could serve PHE as it evolves over the next twenty years.
By Child & Maternal Health Intelligence Network (2013)
Our breastfeeding profiles show how local areas perform against a range of indicators describing breastfeeding behaviours and health outcomes for mothers and their children. We have updated these profiles to provide the latest available data and added a new indicator showing hospital admissions of very young babies. The profiles allow you to make comparisons with others in order to identify and learn from better performing areas.
By Public Health England (2013)
This summary report and associated tables present the results of standardised dental examinations of five year old children from across England during the 2011/12 school year. The tables provide details of total five year old population, sample size, number of children examined, along with weighted values for a number of dental and oral health indicators. Data and associated confidence intervals are presented at upper and lower tier local authority level.
By Department of Health (January 2013)
This longstanding advice is set out by the Department of Health and the Food Standards Agency.
The department is aware that there has been debate over the preparation of formula milks using water at a temperature lower than 70°C. This is a concern because our precautionary approach sets out that people should make up formula milks using water at a temperature of 70°C, or above, to help minimise the microbiological risk to infants.
Health professionals have been communicating this message and this has helped to achieve high levels of compliance when parents prepare formula milks as evidenced by the NHS infant feeding survey – UK 2010, chapter 5: Use of milk other than breastmilk.
The Chief Medical Officer and the Director for Public Health Nursing do not want to lose this impetus and have asked relevant health professionals including GPs, midwives, health visitors and pharmacists to continue to give this precautionary advice to parents. The equalities analysis sets out how this advice impacts on a wide range of people.
Williamson, I. et al. Maternal & Child Nutrition, 2012; 8(4): 434-437
In this paper, we use interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the experiences of eight British first-time mothers who struggled with breastfeeding in the early post-partum period. Participants kept audio-diary accounts of their infant feeding experiences across a 7-day period immediately following the birth of their infant and took part in related semi-structured interviews a few days after completion of the diary. The overarching theme identified was of a tension between the participants’ lived, embodied experience of struggling to breastfeed and the cultural construction of breastfeeding as ‘natural’ and trouble-free. Participants reported particular difficulties interpreting the pain they experienced during feeds and their emerging maternal identities were threatened, often fluctuating considerably from feed to feed. We discuss some of the implications for breastfeeding promotion and argue for greater awareness and understanding of breastfeeding difficulties so that breastfeeding women are less likely to interpret these as a personal shortcoming in a manner which disempowers them. We also advocate the need to address proximal and distal influences around the breastfeeding dyad and, in particular, to consider the broader cultural context in the UK where breastfeeding is routinely promoted yet often constructed as a shameful act if performed in the public arena.
Please contact your locall NHS health library to request this article (NHS staff only)
By Unicef (2012)
This report looks at how raising breastfeeding rates could save money through improving health outcomes. It finds that for five illnesses, moderate increases in breastfeeding would translate into cost savings for the NHS of £40 million and tens of thousands of fewer hospital admissions and GP consultations. It analyses three conditions: cognitive ability, childhood obesity, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and finds that modest improvements in breastfeeding rates could save millions of pounds.
Kirk, SF. et al. International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health, 2012; 9(4): 1308-1318
Healthy public policy plays a central role in creating environments that are supportive of health. Breastfeeding, widely supported as the optimal mode for infant feeding, is a critical factor in promoting infant health. In 2005, the Canadian province of Nova Scotia introduced a provincial breastfeeding policy. This paper describes the process and outcomes of an evaluation into the implementation of the policy. This evaluation comprised focus groups held with members of provincial and district level breastfeeding committees who were tasked with promoting, protecting and supporting breastfeeding in their districts. Five key themes were identified, which were an unsupportive culture of breastfeeding; the need for strong leadership; the challenges in engaging physicians in dialogue around breastfeeding; lack of understanding around the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes; and breastfeeding as a way to address childhood obesity. Recommendations for other jurisdictions include the need for a policy, the value of leadership, the need to integrate policy with other initiatives across sectors and the importance of coordination and support at multiple levels. Finally, promotion of breastfeeding offers a population-based strategy for addressing the childhood obesity epidemic and should form a core component of any broader strategies or policies for childhood obesity prevention.