Breastfeeding: why nurses need to encourage and support mothers with babies in hospital

The RCN’s latest guidance offers advice on promoting breastfeeding in children’s wards and departments

Emma Hobden, a deputy sister on a children’s ward, was admitted to hospital with dangerously high blood pressure when her son was three weeks old.

She had postpartum pre-eclampsia, which left her body swollen with excess fluid and, still recovering from a caesarean section, she had to fight to keep her son with her so she could feed him.

‘Apart from one male doctor, who was great, no one could understand why I wanted to keep my baby with me and breastfeed him,’ she recalls.

‘Breastfeeding was so important to me and it had been going well. As a nurse I had a