Lactation: A Foundational Strategy for Health Promotion

"Our focus on social determinants of health, e.g. related to poverty, health literacy, lack of housing and sustainable food sources is global - and breastfeeding can be a "solution". Women and their families lack support from health care providers, their communities, and their governments/countries to meet their lactation goals and infant feeding needs. Health care professionals (HCPs) are sometimes hesitant to support new families for fear of causing guilt or shame. But if HCPs were able to frame breastfeeding and lactation as health promotion, not a choice of feeding, perhaps they could learn to be respectful and supportive of new parents in this venture. This book will reflect a post-modern society that values and respects the diversity of families. Taking a social-ecological perspective using a person-centred care framework with the dyad at the center, this book will reflect lactation as a foundational health promotion strategy and focus on strategies, theory, interventions, service delivery models etc., to make the case for lactation as foundational to global health (with international examples) and concrete ways forward for practitioners to incorporate culturally sensitive holistic care within a therapeutic relational practice model"--