The Level of Awareness Regarding Ten Steps Guideline for Successful Breastfeeding among Hospital Staff

Introduction: The purpose of this study was to determine the level of familiarity of hospital personnel with the executive instruction on breastfeeding promotion in the hospital.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was performed on hospital personnel who had entry criteria. Their awareness of the breastfeeding guidelines was checked and recorded on the checklist. This checklist consists of two parts, the first part of which is the demographic information including age, gender and work experience of the participants. The second part of the checklist contains ten questions. In this study, statistical analysis was performed based on SPSS 23 software. In the statistics section, frequency and percentage were used.

Results: In this study, 451 and 228 personnel of Amirkabir and Taleghani Hospitals were enrolled, 75.6% and 76.75% of Amir Kabir Hospital and Taleghani Hospital staffs had an acceptable familiarity with these guidelines. In addition, employees of Taleghani Hospital obtained higher scores than Amir Kabir Hospital staff and this difference was statistically significant. In other words, Taleghani hospital staff was generally more familiar with the guideline for promoting breastfeeding. The age of the personnel has a meaningful relationship with their level of knowledge and employees with the age of 41 to 50 years have the highest level of awareness. The level of knowledge of personnel showed a significant relationship with work experience, where the highest level of personnel awareness was observed in employees with a history of over 20 years.

Conclusion: Although the awareness of hospital staff was good about the 10-point action plan for promoting breastfeeding, however, more training was needed to achieve more favorable outcomes. Our findings showed that personnel with less work experience had less information in this regard.