Initiation of lactation: Prophylactic lactation support as Standard of Care for mothers of NICU infants - with discussion

Medela’s Breastfeeding & Lactation Symposium 2023 featured a world-class agenda for healthcare professionals keen to learn about the latest scientific evidence in the field of human milk and lactation towards improving the quality of lactation care and infant feeding.

The agenda included the following lectures:

• Lactation as a biological system: The dynamics of human milk composition (Prof. Lars Bode, USA)
• Lactation as a biological system: The importance of dose (Prof. Donna Geddes, Australia)
• A call to action: Improving human milk & breastfeeding outcomes by prioritizing effective initiation of lactation (Prof. Diane Spatz, USA)
• Initiation of lactation: Prophylactic lactation support as Standard of Care for mothers of NICU infants (Dr Rebecca Hoban, Canada)
• Improving survival & outcomes for preterm infants through optimizing early maternal breast milk: A national quality improvement toolkit from BAPM (Dr Sarah Bates)
• Prioritizing own mother‘s milk in the neonatal unit: Need for standardized metrics that capture lactation and infant feeding (Prof. Neena Modi)

This webinar features the lecture of Dr Rebecca Hoban: Initiation of lactation: Prophylactic lactation support as Standard of Care for mothers of NICU infants. 

Dr Rebecca Hoban is a staff neonatologist and the Director of Breastfeeding Medicine at The Hospital for Sick Children (“SickKids”) in Toronto, and an Associate Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Toronto. Dr Hoban graduated from Indiana University School of Medicine and completed a paediatric residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, a neonatal-perinatal medicine fellowship at Tufts University, and a MPH at Harvard before joining the Neonatology and Human Milk Research team at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Dr Hoban joined SickKids in 2017 as neonatology staff, with a focus on human milk. Current projects include improving mother’s milk provision in the NICU, milk biomarkers to predict lactation success, inflammatory markers in human milk, and fresh milk as potential stem cell therapy in premature infants with intraventricular haemorrhage.

This program has been approved for 1.0 contact hours; provider approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing, CEP 13692.

This course is CPD (Continuing Professional Development) certified.