Professional Roles in Provision of Breastfeeding and Lactation Support: A Scoping Review

The United States lacks a comprehensive framework to describe how multidisciplinary efforts to support breastfeeding and lactation fit together. The purpose of this article is to assess the roles of perinatal health care professionals in providing breastfeeding and lactation support (BFLS) along the perinatal care continuum and to offer a preliminary conceptual framework.

We conducted a scoping review to examine the breadth and depth of published position statements by perinatal care professional organizations about BFLS.

Methodology for scoping reviews outlined by Peters et al. (2020) was used. We identified nine professions as primarily implicated in provision of perinatal care in the United States, seven of which had national professional organizations. We searched PubMed and a generic web engine to identify position statements from those organizations. We used thematic analysis to create an adapted framework of the perinatal care continuum illustrating how BFLS from perinatal health care professionals can be mapped onto the care continuum.

Some overlap in roles were noted as were some gaps regarding professional roles in different phases of the perinatal care continuum. Overall, most professional perinatal care organizations described specific BFLS roles for their practitioners and recommended collaboration with other perinatal care professions.

The full spectrum of BFLS involves information sharing and anticipatory guidance which begins in the preconception period and lasts through 2 or more years postpartum. Interprofessional collaboration, such as through engagement with state-based perinatal quality collaboratives or other interprofessional perinatal partnerships, is essential to ensuring that families receive cohesive, comprehensive BFLS.