Nurse-midwife support at home and success with breast feeding

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of professional support on success with breast feeding. The hypothesis was as follows: the group with teaching and support by nurse-midwife during the postpartum period will demonstrate a greater degree of success with breast feeding than the group without such teaching and support. Success was measured by the total number of days breast fed during which supplementation was given less than once in 24 hours and normal infant weight gain was achieved. Subjects were selected among patients delivered by private obstetricians at a private 570-bed general hospital. A sample of 24 married primiparas women were used to establish the experimental and control groups. The experimental group did not breast feed a significantly greater number of days (F ratio = .537, p = .467), However, they did have a greater number of mothers breast feedings at 6 weeks postpartum; 75% of the experimental group were breast feeding at 6 weeks postpartum, in contrast to 58.3% if the control group. This difference was not statistically significant (F ratio = .710, p = .409), because the difference between the groups was not greater than the difference within the groups. The experimental group tended to feed less cereal than the control group (F ratio = 2.59, p = .122); however, no difference was noted in the formula supplementation used by the two groups (F ration = .281, p = .601). The data from the initial hospital interview form, designed primarily to identify possible intervening variables, indicated five areas of difference between the experimental and the control groups. The investigator believed the effect of support on the experimental group was suppressed because of this initial difference between the two groups. A total of 451 needs were identified during 48 contacts with mothers in the experimental group. The mothers identified 71% of the needs, and the investigator identified the remaining 29%. The average number of needs of problems identified for each contact was 7.4. The investigator classified each need as unresolved, partially resolved, or resolved. Twenty-six percent of the needs identified were classified as unresolved, 48% as partially resolved, and 25.5% as resolved. Thus 73.5% of the needs either were resolved or showed movement towards resolution. One of the most interesting findings of this study was that the mother tended either to be settled into breast feedings or to have reacted a decision to wean the baby to a bottle by the eleventh to the eighteenth day postpartum.