Grant: Op. Grant: NWHRI: Innovation Fund - Healthcare implementation research

Breastfeeding helps protect women against many chronic illnesses, such as certain cancers, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. However, many women face challenges when trying to breastfeed. In 2019, the Breastfeeding Committee for Canada began a national project aimed at helping hospitals provide high quality care specifically supporting women/birthing parents to breastfeed. This care is known as the Baby-Friendly Initiative. The Breastfeeding Committee for Canada involved 25 hospitals from across Canada in their quality improvement project. They used a well-established model, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's Breakthrough Series Model, to assist hospitals in improving care practices. Hospital staff were offered one-on-one coaching, webinars, workshops, and tools for data collection to help track their progress towards implementing the ten steps of the Baby-Friendly Initiative. At the end of the project, four hospitals received the Baby-Friendly designation, signifying that they had successfully put in place policies and practices to support breastfeeding. Six more hospitals were working towards this designation and several others had begun implementing the Baby-Friendly steps. However, questions remain about how best to extend the Baby-Friendly Initiative to community health centres and public health units to reach more women/birthing parents and help extend the period of time that they are able to breastfeed. In this proposal, our team, which holds expertise in quality improvement methods, breastfeeding healthcare practices, and women's health, will address these questions to ensure that all people who want to breastfeed receive the support they need, with the ultimate aim of promoting better health and health equity for the Canadian population.