Nursing class plugs benefits of breastfeeding

The effects of the community-based breastfeeding class that started at the School of Nursing 10 years ago are spreading not just throughout Philadelphia, but across the entire field of nursing. Diane Spatz, a Nursing professor, started teaching "Case Study in Breastfeeding and Human Lactation" in 1995. This seminar of between 15 and 23 students is offered every fall and consists of two hours of instruction and 14 hours of related work at community sites per week, in addition to an individual community-advocacy project. The course "focuses on the community service that the students do [for] the advocacy of breastfeeding," Spatz said. "Even though we know breastfeeding is best, bottle-feeding is the cultural norm," she added. Currently, barely 20 percent of impoverished women in West Philadelphia breastfeed. When Spatz started the course, very few nursing schools had in-depth breastfeeding courses. "They learn from the scientific evidence and then go on to affect the community," she said, adding that "Penn Nursing grads go all over the world." Spatz and her students have been able to identify many different communities and groups to which to advocate breastfeeding. "Advocacy takes many different shapes," Spatz said, "by targeting many different types of groups to break down cultural barriers." Last month, Spatz published an article in the Journal of Human Lactation that provided models for creating similar programs and for demonstrating the impact that breastfeeding advocacy can have on communities. Spatz's article outlines five areas where breastfeeding advocacy has especially succeeded. One area is the participation of the father. A support group for fathers started by a Penn Nursing student has been run successfully out of Pennsylvania Hospital in Center City for five years. There have also been efforts to reach out to immigrant communities, equip community hospitals for counseling, change community perceptions of public breastfeeding and make children more familiar with breastfeeding. "Different communities need different approaches -- they have to be multifaceted," Spatz said. In her article, Spatz noted that since studies show that many women have decided whether or not to breastfeed before deciding to have children, breastfeeding awareness has to start early. "Children do not know about breastfeeding if they did not have it done to them, and they do not learn it in school," Spatz said. Among West Philadelphia sites that have benefitted from the work of Spatz' students is the Nursing School Health Annex, at which multiple students have done projects. Nursing senior Jennie Petruney did a project at Albert Einstein Medical Center training nurses in a breastmilk-measurement technique. She was able to tailor it specifically to Einstein with the help of the hospital's own breastfeeding specialists. "Before the class, I knew that breastfeeding was important. Now I know that it is essential. Now I know how to instruct, inform and advocate," Petruney said.