Health-care providers

Supporting families and their health-care providers

If you are a health-care provider, welcome and thank you for your support of breastfeeding! This website complements the care you provide by educating families and reinforcing your recommendations, thereby making the time you spend with patients more effective and improving outcomes. You can use the website to (1) review topics you are familiar with, (2) to learn new information, and (3) keep current with research. We have over 3,000 studies listed and add more as they emerge.

A) How we can help health-care providers

This website provides mothers and other caregivers useful information about normal breastfeeding, normal infant behaviour, and how to address breastfeeding challenges. This information can:

  • Educate mothers and other caregivers on the behaviour of normal babies thus avoiding unnecessary visits to health-care providers.
  • Direct them to seek help when appropriate.
  • Equip them to work with their providers to make informed decisions.

The website benefits health-care providers by:

  • Complementing the care given to families.
  • Making the time spent with families more effective.
  • Improving outcomes.
  • Providing an educational resource that is evidence-based and effective and contains over 3,000 references that are regularly updated.

Health-care providers can recommend mothers and other caregivers consult the website:

  • Prior to seeing them in the office, in order to have a more informed and efficient discussion at the time of the visit.
  • Once in the office, as the website has many visual aids which can be used as teaching tools.  
  • After the visit, to reinforce information given during the visit.

B) Evidence-based

Our information is evidence-based when possible. We have cited over 3,000 research articles,  and we continue to update this website as new literature emerges.

Where there are gaps in the literature, we rely on reasonable approaches from other areas of medicine such as dermatology, plastic surgery, and pediatrics, and on the clinical experience of Dr. Marie Wallace-Gross. She is a Canadian family physician with extensive experience in helping breastfeeding families.

C) Scope of support

We have purposely avoided specific treatment protocols, such as recommending a particular antibiotic or diagnostic test, as the choices vary depending on local availability and practices and individual factors. Rather we encourage individuals to consult their health-care providers in these matters.

This open approach makes our website more user-friendly for health-care providers and minimizes the amount of conflicting information families receive.

D) For health-care students and learners

Our website is a very useful educational tool for those learning to help mothers and babies as it which provides practical, effective, and evidence-based information. 

Our medical director, Dr. Marie Wallace-Gross, was an assistant clinical professor at a major Canadian University for over 20 years during which time she taught breastfeeding to physicians, medical students, nurses, and other learners. Her experience as a highly-rated educator ensures that our information is clear, logical, and concise.