Feeding your baby
Support with feeding is offered by all members of the health visiting team at the new birth visit and any follow up contacts at home or in the child health clinic.
Health visitors, community nurses and nursery nurses undertake the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative Breastfeeding training and can provide mothers and families with information and practical support to help you achieve your breastfeeding goals. Specialist breastfeeding support is offered by appointment in children's centres, and run by a member of the health visiting team who has had additional experience and breastfeeding training.
How you feed your baby is a personal choice and as your health visitors we are here to support you and your baby with whatever feeding choices you make. Our health visiting teams are trained in infant feeding and we are here to answer your questions and help with infant feeding at all stages. This includes providing support and information to parents who are formula feeding their babies, helping them to feed safely and responsively.
There is lots of information out there about breast and bottle feeding. Here is a selection of our favourite useful links and videos. You can also contact our health visiting team if you have any questions or concerns about feeding your baby when they arrive, on 0208 200 2500 (option 2).
For details of your local services please see our infant feeding support group timetable.
- Breastfeeding Network - Expressing and Storing Breastmilk
- Global health media films on all aspects of breastfeeding (available in different languages)
- UNICEF - Maximising breastmilk
- UNICEF - Positioning & attachment
- UNICEF - Ineffective attachment
- UNICEF - Hand expression films
- UNICEF - Infant formula and responsive bottle feeding
- UNICEF - Breastfeeding & bottle feeding guides in other languages
- iHV - How to help if your baby has Reflux
- First Steps Nutrition - Eating well in the first year
- CLCH - Introduction to solid foods leaflet
- CLCH - Introducing Solids video
- CLCH - Infant Feeding: Introduction to Sleep video
- The Lullaby Trust - Safer sleep advice, reducing the risk of SIDS
- BASIS Baby sleep information
Below are the checklists our health visiting teams use to check that feeding is going well and identify any areas where you may need additional help. You can use them too:
