CLCH health visiting achieves UNICEF Baby Friendly Gold Reaccreditation
Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust (CLCH) is delighted to announce recent achievements as part of the UNICEF baby friendly accreditation initiative.
In September 2019, our health visiting service in the inner London boroughs (Westminster, Hammersmith & Fulham, Kensington & Chelsea) were the first in London to achieve the UNICEF Baby Friendly Gold Sustainability Award and this has been followed by Gold Reaccreditation in January 2021.
In January 2021, our Ealing health visiting team achieved Stage Two Accreditation and are now working towards Stage Three Accreditation with the aim of achieving this by the end of 2021.
Baby Friendly accreditation is based on a set of evidence-based standards which are designed to provide parents with the best possible care to build close and loving relationships with their babies and to feed them in ways which will support optimum health and development with a focus on protecting, promoting and supporting breastfeeding. Organisations implement the standards in stages over a number of years, gaining the awards through external assessments by UNICEF UK, culminating in the UNICEF Gold Sustainability Award.
CLCH is proud to note these tremendous achievements as they are recognition of the high quality service provided by the Trust’s health visiting teams, excellent breastfeeding rates and monitoring of infant feeding data and a commitment from senior management to support implementation of the BFI standards into practice. Special thanks also goes to the Infant Feeding Leads as their training, development and support to the health visiting teams and breastfeeding mothers has been instrumental in achieving the awards.
All CLCH health visiting teams are working towards the UNICEF BFI accreditation.
Charlie Sheldon, CLCH Chief Nurse said, "This is an amazing achievement, reached in spite of the extraordinary circumstances that we have been working in. We can be in no doubt that the work you have all done will have a positive impact on the children and families we work with.”
You can read more about the UNICEF baby friendly initiative on the UNICEF website: https://www.unicef.org.uk/babyfriendly/
