As we reported earlier, there has no been maternal death since the start of the year. That’s good news for the Ministry of Health but on the flip side, only one out of every ten of those mothers who successfully give birth breast-feed. Both the Ministry of Health and specifically the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital have been making in roads into re-institutionalizing the practice of breast feeding and today that earned the hospital international recognition.
Keith Swift Reporting,
These are a few of the sons and daughters born at the KHMH within the last 12 months. They are pictures of perfect health and their mothers say that’s probably because the nurses at the KHMH insisted they breast feed.
Deshawn Card, Mother
“When I had my baby they told me that no bottle, it is only going to be breast feeding and so I took that.”
Nelysia Flowers, Mother
“They came and forced the baby on me and told me the benefits of breast feeding and they wanted me to breast feed. So they didn’t give me a bottle or nothing like that. They helped me position the baby. It is no formula, strictly breast milk.”
Tomasa Smith, Breast Feeding Counselor
“I have been working with mothers, working with the hospital staff for a number of years now doing training, doing support group for mothers, teaching them how to breast feed, positioning and to prepare food and other things so they could keep the baby healthy.”
Dr. Lara Largaespada, Maternal and Child Health Technical Advisor
“What we’re doing is training the staff and encouraging the staff to speak to the mothers, explain to them the importance of breast feeding, exclusive breast feeding the first six months, that is proven to save lives, increase the intellectual capacity of the kids also because they learn better. So that is where we are right now.
The initiative has steps and tools that allow the staff to be monitoring their performance and once they meet a minimum of 80% of each one of these ten steps then the hospitals can be certified as baby friendly. In this case, KHMH scored 93%.”
And that earned the hospital a certification from UNICEF as a ‘Baby Friendly’ hospital. UNICEF’s Country Representative Rana Flowers says while breast is still best, only ten percent of mothers in Belize do it.
Rana Flowers, UNICEF Country Rep.
“It is the best start you can give a baby and it really is an easy sell when mothers have that information.
They’ve been working really hard and it doesn’t happen over night. There is lots of trainings, there is lots of assessments that get done, there are criteria, ten steps in particular that they have to meet, and the KHMH has done that. They have been able to meet that criteria and they are now in a position where they are going to get an international award for that but it doesn’t stop there. We are going to be assessing them, they will in particular go through a major assessment again in 2 years time and in between time we are going to be assessing the degree to which the rates breast feeding are increasing in Belize.
In Belize at the moment you know we have 10%, one in ten women are breast feeding their babies and that just indicates that women don’t know the benefits of breast feeding and they don’t realize that they are really not doing right by their babies by giving the babies formula.”
As UNICEF Country Representative Rana Flowers noted the hospital will be reviewed regularly.
