Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat, a Leas-Chathaoirligh. I welcome the Minister of State and thank her for coming to the House.

A year, a week and a day ago, the Minister for Health announced that there would be 24 new lactation consultants appointed in 2022. My simple question to the Minister of State is: where are they?

I must credit the wonderful campaigning group, Bainne Beatha, for alerting us to the date last week. When the announcement by the Minister was made last year, we very much welcomed it, but from talking to campaigners on the ground, there is a real question mark now as to where exactly are those posts. Have people been appointed?

As the Minister of State will be aware, the scale of the challenge is enormous if we want to improve breastfeeding rates in this country. It is about improving the interventions; it is about improving the peer-to-peer experience and it is about improving the culture, both within hospitals and within the community.

It is really important to acknowledge that it is every individual family's right to decide how best they want to feed their own baby, but it is those women and families who want help and who have been seeking help but have been so badly let down by the public system that we really need to help.

According to the Irish Maternity Indicator System National Report 2020, breastfeeding was initiated after birth for 62.3% of babies born in 2020. That is a decent number. That falls to 58.5% either exclusively breastfeeding or combination feeding upon discharge of hospital. Within six months, that falls to approximately 15% of babies.

There is a real failure, both in hospitals that we would see any drop in breastfeeding rates between when a baby is born and upon discharge, and then, of course, when women are back within their own communities.

I suppose the failures are that we have considerably inconsistencies in hospitals with regard to culture, practice and availability. I was talking to a woman the other day who was telling me of how she struggled trying to feed and, unknown to her and without her permission, her baby was given a bottle of formula when she happened to be asleep. This was only two years ago in a national maternity hospital; that is disgraceful. The hospital has yet to acknowledge that such an incident happened and yet two beds over, a woman had a completely different experience and does not recognise that other lady's terrible experience at all. We have situations where the master of a maternity hospital and the ward sister are walking around telling mothers to put away the bottles that are on their shelves and hiding that babies are being fed formula.

Of course, there are issues with the availability, particularly at weekends, of lactation consultants. We know from the Bainne Beatha survey last year of women repeatedly making requests for a lactation consultant within the hospital, yet those requests went unheard. We accept we have had Covid and all that, but this is not a new phenomenon. This has been going on for many years.

Within the community, I am still hearing varying experience with regards to the service and advice, in particular, that public health nurses are providing. I am told within CHO 9, within Dublin north city and county, that all 22 public health nurses have received breastfeeding training, yet I know on the ground that there are some public health nurses actively advising mothers to give up breastfeeding and that there is an easier way.

Do we have these new posts on the ground and what is being done about training those who are in really important roles with vulnerable mothers at an important time in their lives?How does the Government propose to improve the situation?