Breast Feeding Initiation and Support: A Literature Review of What Women Value and Impact of Early Discharge

This study was conducted on breast feeding initiation and support: A literature review of what women value and impact of early discharge. Breastfeeding is when feed the baby breast milk, usually directly from breast. It?s also called nursing. Early or timely initiation of breastfeeding, specifically within one hour of birth, refers to the best practice recommendation by the World Health Organization (WHO). The first six months of life have higher growth velocity and are also the vulnerable period for nutrition - related health events in infants. There is strong evidence that breastfed infants are at a reduced risk of being overweight or obese during childhood. Evidence from a meta - analysis suggests the risk of overweight was reduced by 4% for every month of breastfeeding - up to nine months of age. Standard protocol of the systematic literature review was used in this study. The search was undertaken from June to August 2021. This drew on published literature in the electronic bibliographic databases of: Academic Search Complete, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL), Global Health, MEDLINE Web of Knowledge and Scopus and supplemented by scanning the reference lists of papers included for review. Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) and Effective Public Health Practice Project (EPHPP) tools were used to assess the qualitative and quantitative studies. The search strategy retrieved 150 studies. After applying the process of selection, 19 studies were included for review. This study suggests that less than half of Indian mothers - initiated breastfeeding within one hours of post - birth (41.5%), with a significant difference in both rural (41.0%) and urban (43.0%) Early initiation of breastfeeding (EIBF) prevalence.