[Expert Solution]: Abstract Eliminating formula giveaways…

Abstract Eliminating formula giveaways (“banning the bag”) has been promoted in The Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding which are considered the broad framework that guide the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) found in Chapter 6 of your text. As described, the core purpose of the BFHI is to ensure that mothers and newborns receive timely and appropriate care before and during their stay in a facility providing maternity and newborn services, and to enable the establishment of optimal feeding of newborns. The BFHI protects, promotes, and supports breastfeeding, while enabling timely and appropriate care and feeding of newborns who are not breastfed. World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (2018). These recommendations are intended to provide guidance and policy aimed at reducing the influence of formula marketing in hospitals and to increase breastfeeding rates among new mothers. For many healthcare professionals, this policy may raise practical and ethical concerns, specifically because it may pose as a barrier and reduce the opportunities to families who have trouble affording formula or who do not have access to International Board-Certified Lactation Consultants and efficient support for lactating mothers. Facility policies to promote breastfeeding, including banning the bag (reducing access to infant formula and support materials for non-breastfeeding mothers post birth), should be sensitive to several aspects of the post-partum culture which include but are not limited to the economic and other costs associated with breastfeeding. Many maternal and infant professionals also feel that to ethically apply these policies, they should be consciously designed to make breastfeeding attractive and facilitate avenues of support, and specifically are not intended to make formula feeding more difficult or unpopular. We recommend that facilities providing maternity and newborn care evaluate the potential negative impacts of implementing policies similar to “banning the bag” on their patient population in order to ensure that families are supported in the post-partum environment and are not being negatively affécted in their infant feeding choices. Case The Mothers and Infants Clinic at the City/County Health Department has been serving its community for more than 75 years. While its patient population has changed substantially over the years to one that is more demographically diverse, The Mothers and Infants Clinic at the City/County Health Department is still relied upon to provide a full range of health care services despite the fact that it serves mostly patients who are underserved: poor, underinsured, or undocumented. Although the City/County Health Department Mothers and Infants Clinic provides pregnant and post-partum services, it also houses one site of The Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children and provides access to the Supplemental Nutrition Access program to patients who are new mothers and their families, The Mothers and Infants Clinic has been primarily responsible for distributing culturally relevant infant formula discharge bags for many years. From all accounts, this service is highly valued among community members and their families. It is widely regarded as not only successful but essential for many families. Dr X is a family physician who just started at The Mothers and Infants Clinic 12 months ago. She saw it as a place where she could deliver good prenatal and postnatal care to vulnerable and underserved patient populations. With that in mind, she raised a concern at the previous Community Impact Committee meeting, which is a subset of the Maternal Health Department. “Given the widely documented benefits Of breastfeeding. Will infant formula disbursement undermine or support women and family choices in the post-partum period? Provude ethical evidence based responses