A review of evidence around postnatal care and breastfeeding

Postnatal care and support for breastfeeding has been central to the United Kingdom maternity care provision for over 100 years. Over that time the burden of care has shifted from home to hospital and back to home again. In the last 10 years, an evidence base has been distilled around the key components of optimum postnatal care and breastfeeding support but the implementation of these has been hampered by an ongoing tensions between a biomedical and social model and by changes in the organization of community postnatal care. These issues are discussed in this paper which concludes with some new developments in care provision.