An infant feeding specialist’s beloved service at Halifax’s community health clinic is about to be slashed by more than half within a month. This recent change is causing alarm among local parents. Even though the nurse practitioner has already been on board for over a year, she is now making plans to leave the clinic. In the meantime, the public health agency has yet to identify a permanent replacement. The popular drop-in service, which has received rave reviews from parents, will formally end in January.
Mayela Lopez Rodrigues feeds her three-month-old son, Santiago. She says the clinic’s support services were key to ensuring that she was able to stay on track with her breastfeeding goals. She reflects on her struggles, stating, “It was getting extremely painful and I had already gone to a doctor and had other nurses at the hospital trying to help me out with breastfeeding… None of that really helped.” The support she got from the clinic was key in helping her work through those challenges.
Polina Lerman had her own breastfeeding hurdles. After several sessions with the clinic’s lactation consultant, she had a huge turnaround. “I was raving about the clinic … and telling a lot of my friends who are expecting to like, be aware that there is that resource for them if they ever need it,” Rodrigues said, emphasizing the importance of accessible support.
Community Impact
Without this drop-in service the closure will leave thousands of parents scrambling to find alternative resources. Despite this loss, patients will continue to receive important primary care services at that site. A 2022 report from the Public Health Agency of Canada shows the challenge in Nova Scotia’s breastfeeding rates within the first six months after birth. This province is significantly below the national average in this key metric.
Britney Benoit is an Assistant Professor of Nursing at St. Francis Xavier University. She’s passionate about ensuring there’s more support-on-demand, like there is at the Halifax clinic. She calls the current lapses in support “glaring,” and explains that most mothers are not able to successfully breastfeed. “I think there is an assumption that breastfeeding is easy, it’s natural, but it’s absolutely not,” Benoit stated.
In her story Benoit goes more in depth on the health benefits of breastfeeding, particularly how crucial support is in those early months. “These include things like prevention of infection and chronic disease in infants and prevention of reproductive cancers and other chronic diseases in the breastfeeding parent,” she explained.
Future Plans
Madonna MacDonald, the acting vice-president of primary care at Nova Scotia Health, says she knows firsthand what a “game-changing” service this is. She’s equally committed to figuring out how to restore it. “We’re not denying it’s a very important service,” she said. And when our providers do come with specialized skills, we want to encourage that. But when they leave, we have a problem on our hands. We need to turn around and come up with a strategy to keep this service in place.
MacDonald assured us that public health and primary health care officials are already in discussions and planning to reinstate some type of drop-in service once possible. So far, they’ve failed to fill in the blanks. This follows the clinic’s decision earlier this month to expand their hours, reflecting a surge in demand for their services after the clinic’s opening.
Instead, accessibility concerns become the burden of new parents to address. Alongside this trend is an increasing recognition of the barriers they face in working to initiate breastfeeding practices. Benoit greatly understates the need for high touch support in those get-go days. Even those who work in the urbanist field might not realize how true this is.
