Breastfeeding and infant feeding support

You, your baby and feeding

Breastfeed or formula feed your baby?

At Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust we are committed to ensuring you can make an informed choice.

We support and are responsive to both your baby’s cues and your instincts. This helps develop a close and loving relationship which is enhanced during feeding.

Here is some useful information to help you make those choices and ensure you receive support through this period.

All our Healthy Family Team staff are trained to support you with feeding. But sometimes new parents need additional support with feeding. So we have a team of Specialist Infant Feeding Leads who are Lactation Consultants and can support with more complex issues. Click here to find out more.

The Trust are proud to have achieved the Unicef Baby Friendly Initiative Gold sustainability accreditation. This award is the highest level of accreditation. It celebrates excellent and sustained practice in the support of infant feeding and parent-infant relationships.

Preparing for baby’s arrival and getting to know your bump

You may have been thinking a lot about your baby, what it may look like, what you may call baby and how you may feed your baby. You may already have a ‘name’ for your bump to help you relate to them more easily.

Have you noticed how your baby moves more at certain times of day? Does baby respond to your voice or to loud noises around it? Take time out to focus on this, talk to your bump, stroke it and include partners and other siblings in this too. This starts the development of a really strong and loving bond between you both and aids the transition to motherhood and being responsive to baby when born. Your baby will also recognise these actions and so you are starting to build those important connections in baby’s brain.

Useful information: Building a Happy Baby (unicef.org.uk)

Once baby is born, there are many ways to develop this relationship further. This includes gazing into baby’s eyes, responding to their ‘babbling’, mirroring their facial expressions as well as smiling and talking to baby.

Holding and cuddling baby is important too. Babies cannot be ‘spoilt’, and responding early to their needs helps babies to feel secure and calm. There is a mounting body of research that tells us that these interactions between baby and their family are important for baby’s mental, emotional and social development.

Also, you and your baby will love it too, and go on to enjoy a closer bond.

Thinking about reasons to breastfeed

During pregnancy your body starts to prepare for breastfeeding - you may notice changes in your breasts. This may make you think more about feeding so gather as much information as you can.