The Breastfeeding Support Nurses are a team of nurses who support and honor the golden hour after delivery. Their role is to keep babies skin-to-skin, assist with the first latch, and teach mothers how to manually express so newborns can benefit from the colostrum during that golden hour period. When mothers initiate skin-to-skin contact post-birth, they have an 85 percent chance of exclusively breastfeeding at discharge from the hospital, compared to a 70 percent chance when infants are delayed being put skin-to-skin contact with their mother by even 10 minutes.

The benefits of breastfeeding for the mom and the newborn have been studied and are widely accepted, recognizing breastfeeding as the gold standard for infant feeding, yet our facility struggled to meet this goal or the patients' preferences. Once we implemented the breastfeeding support nurse team we went from 61% breastfeeding rates to 74% and consistently have increased to 78% showing sustainability in this metric.

Not only has this team become excited to implement evidence into their daily practice, but many have chosen to go on and study or already have taken their lactation certification ( IBCLC). This team is infectious and it has spread throughout the unit. The collaboration between the Support Nurse Team, patients, mom baby RNs, lactation, and providers is admirable and inspirational. The goal of the Support Nurse Team was to determine if implemented evidence-based interventions would contribute to the nursing profession by improving the nurses’ ability to provide support to mothers with breastfeeding, which would improve exclusive breastfeeding rates during the newborn’s hospitalization. The Support Nurse Team has done just this and overall it directly can benefit positive patient outcomes and patient experience.