Development of a breastfeeding training model in the north east of England

Many policy drivers have identified the need for and importance of peer support for breastfeeding. The Marmot Review (2009) recognises that support for breastfeeding mothers can help to increase breastfeeding rates and in turn reduce health and social inequalities. Breastfeeding peer support groups offer much more to a community than is measureable in terms of money. Deprived areas of the UK are seen as having ‘lost skills’ in breastfeeding; they have no experience or tradition of breastfeeding to draw upon and therefore are unable to view it as an everyday activity which impacts on an intention to breastfeed and leads to bottle feeding. South Tyneside is one of the most deprived areas in the UK, as such has integrated and implemented peer counsellor training into the support model for new mothers and the training model with other professionals with high success rate and spin off of more than a fifth moving on to nurse education.