Health Visiting team achieves UNICEF gold

The Health Visiting team at Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust has been awarded UNICEF’s most prestigious award, marking their continuing excellence in supporting local families with feeding and developing close, loving relationships with their babies.

The UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative Gold Award is only made to organisations that can demonstrate sustained work to not only deliver quality advice, support and care, but to embed high standards into policies and practice with staff supported and trained to maintain those standards. It requires years of work and commitment to ensure the right leadership, culture, monitoring and progression are in place to deliver those high-quality, sustainable practices and care for babies and their families.

Some of the leadership team praised by UNICEF as being “engaged and knowledgeable” with members of the Community Infant Feeding Team (l-r) Peer Support Service Lead Judith Nevin, Breastfeeding Support Worker Marie Hall, Service Manager Gill Brayshaw, Baby friendly Implementation Lead LesleyAnne Bellamy, Strategic Breastfeeding Lead Jane Dickens, Peer Support Service Lead Julie Newbold and Breastfeeding co-ordinator Claire Wiseman

In their report UNICEF praised the Care Trust’s long history of Baby Friendly accreditation, robust leadership and the “skilled, enthusiastic and effective” Community Infant Feeding Team (part of the Health Visiting service) supported by an engaged and knowledgeable leadership team and Guardian.

Baby friendly Implementation Lead LesleyAnne Bellamy with Guardian, Director of Nursing/Professions and Trust Deputy Chief Executive Phillipa Hubbard.

LesleyAnne Bellamy is an Infant Feeding Specialist Practitioner and Baby friendly Implementation Lead. She led the work to achieve the gold award and commented:

“This has been a massive effort from our Health Visiting team, the Community Infant Feeding Team, our Strategic Breastfeeding Lead Jane Dickens and our Guardian, Phillipa Hubbard, Director of Nursing/Professions, who is also the Trust’s Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Nursing and Quality for Bradford Healthcare Partnership (distributed leadership).

“Achieving gold takes a lot of work to ensure high standards can and are maintained – they have to become ‘the way we do things’, the way we work. Our service has achieved that, which means families across Bradford can be confident of excellent feeding advice and support with a wide range of feeding issues, including complex problems which need to be referred for specialist help.”

Local mum Kerrie with son Albie at a Baby Feeding Support Session run by the Community Infant Feeding team.

Local mum Kerrie and son Albie visited one of the Baby Feeding Support Sessions run by the Community Infant Feeding team. Although she initially went for the social aspect to meet other mums, Kerrie found the sessions extremely valuable when she became upset and increasingly anxious about Albie’s weight.

“The infant feeding team were very reassuring and gave me lots of advice. As the problem got worse, they referred us to the dietician and paediatrician – they did everything they could do to make sure support was in place as soon as possible. There are still problems and issues, but I’ve got people involved who can support and advise, so I feel much better.”

Director of Nursing/Professions and Trust Deputy Chief Executive Phillipa Hubbard said: “It takes years and years to work through the various levels of the Baby Friendly Initiative, demonstrating time after time that we are committed to those high standards, so I’m absolutely thrilled about this award which recognises the exceptional work of our teams in supporting local families.”