Description

UNICEF Chief of Health Mickey Chopra discusses the importance of breastfeeding in reducing child mortality.

Transcript

World Breastfeeding Week: Importance of Breastfeeding You're watching UNICEF Television Female: UNICEF chief of health Mickey Chopra discusses how UNICEF supports worldwide programs that encourage more women to breastfeed. Dr. Mickey Chopra: This year we’re focusing on Breastfeeding, 10 Steps to a Baby Friendly way and that refers to ten simple steps that hospitals and clinics and health workers working in those facilities can make which will allow and give information to mothers to exclusively breastfeed their children for the first six months. These are ten steps which have been implemented in over a quarter of all hospitals that deliver babies around the world and where they have been implemented what we find is that mothers are much more confident and much more likely to exclusively breastfeed their children in the first six months. We have experiences of countries such as gone away the rights of exclusive breastfeeding have gone up from less than 10% more than half of all mothers exclusively breastfeeding for six months. And what we found is that there are many different influences on the decisions that mothers make. But Health workers have a profound and very important influence on what mothers decide about how to feed their children. And therefore educating and changing the behaviors of health workers is very important. So we've learned that they have an enormous influence on mothers and corers and the community and both by their own behaviors but also by the kinds of information that on the ways in which they model their behaviors can be very important for the community as a whole. Female: You’ve been watching Unicef Television. For more information visit Unicef.org. Unite for Children.