| dc.description.abstract | Extensive research has determined breastfeeding provides widespread benefits, including protection against disease for a newborn, decreased postpartum complications for a mother, and a cost-effective safe lifestyle choice for the environment. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends exclusive breastfeeding for six months as the normative standard for infant feeding (Eidelman et al., 2012). Likewise, The World Health Organization (WHO) has reaffirmed the AAP's Breastfeeding Policy and states "breastfeeding is the normal way of providing young infants with the nutrients they need for healthy growth and development" (WHO, 2011). In the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), the choice to breastfeed is affected by many factors including parental stress, access to lactation consultant education, and the health of the critically ill newborn. Researchers have exhausted literature and concluded no tool exists to measure the factors that influence a woman's decision to breastfeed an infant in the NICU. Therefore, the investigators created a 32 item questionnaire to measure factors affecting breastfeeding. The original long-form tool was created and a preliminary round of data was collected. The Texas Health Fort Worth (THFW) team used regression and factor analysis to create a short-form measure with 15 items. This new short-form tool was distributed amongst the same population of mothers with infants in the THFW NICU. Finally, the tool's psychometric properties will be analyzed and with success, this tool can be administered to mothers across the nation to determine barriers to infant feeding in the NICU. | |
