ATTUNE STUDY
Research type
Research Study
Full title
ATTUNE Study: Assessing The evidence and impacT of the UNICEF UK Baby Friendly InitiativE
IRAS ID
348668
Contact name
Gill Thomson
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Central Lancashire
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 0 months, 0 days
Research summary
Since 1991, the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative (BFI) has transformed the infant feeding arena via evidence-based practices designed to protect, support, and promote breastfeeding. These practices include antenatal education for parents on the benefits and risks of different infant feeding methods, encouraging immediate and sustained skin-to-skin contact, enabling parents to identify their infant’s feeding cues for responsive feeding, providing early and community-based needs-led infant feeding support, and implementation of the WHO code to help prevent the aggressive and inappropriate marketing of infant formula and related products (i.e., bottles and teats). Following a landmark review undertaken by the UNICEF UK BFI team in 2012, the UK BFI standards were revised. This transformational change moved away from an exclusive focus on promoting and supporting breastfeeding to one that centres on parent-infant relationships and the grassroots involvement of staff and parents. While the BFI was originally designed for hospitals, it has been expanded to cover neonatal units, Children Centres, health visiting, and university-based midwifery and health visiting programmes. In April 2023 97% of maternity services and 89% of health visiting services were working towards UNICEF UK BFI accreditation. Despite this progress, there continues to be challenges including low breastfeeding rates (particularly in terms of continuation rates), mixed reports of parents’ satisfaction with infant feeding support and aggressive marketing (particularly via digital means) of infant formula that can erode parental confidence. The ATTUNE study intends to explore these challenges to ensure the relevance, efficacy and contribution of the BFI to systems change, and to parental and infant health. This mixed-methods study will be undertaken in two key stages – an evidence synthesis and an impact case study. The impact case study will collect evidence-based accounts detailing the impact that the UNICEF UK BFI standards have had on parents, infants, families, and healthcare/community professionals.
REC name
London - Westminster Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
24/PR/1537
Date of REC Opinion
29 Jan 2025
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion