A few months ago a group of mothers and my breastfeeding coalition organized an event to advocate for our area hospitals to become Baby Friendly. It was a big success. We can't claim all the credit for this, but there are now several hospitals in our region planning to seek the award.
The biggest hit of the event was Dr. Bobbi Phillip, pediatrician and Medical Director of The Birth Place at Boston Medical Center. While there are 16,000 Baby Friendly Hospitals in the world, there are only around 75 in the U.S., and one in Massachusetts. Dr. Phillip was a driving force in the successful effort to get the award for her hospital.
I was really happy to find a series of videos which are essentially the talk she gave at our event. I'm putting two segments up in which she discusses the effort to improve breastfeeding rates at Boston Medical Center, but the whole talk is really worth watching. You can hear about the amazing effects of changing breastfeeding policies at her hospital, and her take on what happened to breastfeeding in the last hundred years.
Her conclusion, speaking for the medical community: "We own most of this problem...the problem lies with us. And we have to look seriously at what's going on."
