In an effort to encourage hospitals and birthing facilities to select exclusive breast milk feeding as one of their performance measures, the United States Breastfeeding Committee (USBC) recently published guidelines to aid hospitals and birthing facilities in collecting the data needed to ensure compliance.

baby gooroo previously addressed the addition of “exclusive breast milk feeding” to the Joint Commission’s new Perinatal Care core measure set. The perinatal care measures are one of 10 sets of measurements which hospitals select from as part of The Joint Commission’s ORYX performance measurement initiative. Introduced in 1997, the ORYX initiative was designed to integrate outcomes and other performance measurement data into the accreditation process.

The Perinatal Care core measure set includes:

• Elective delivery

• Cesarean section

• Antenatal steroids

• Health care-associated bloodstream infections in newborns

• Exclusive breast milk feeding

The Joint Commission first began requiring accredited hospitals to collect data on standardized (core) performance measures in 2002. These standardized measures are designed to improve the quality of patient care by focusing on procedures and outcomes. Hospitals are required to collect and transmit data to The Joint Commission for a minimum of four voluntarily selected core measure sets or a combination of applicable core measure sets and non-core measures based on the patient population they serve.

This is a long fought victory for those who believe that exclusive breast milk feeding offers unique benefits compared to all other methods of infant feeding. Much of the data on the benefits of breastfeeding have been called into question due to the absence of a clear definition of breastfeeding in many of the studies. Now that The Joint Commission has defined exclusive breast milk feeding as, “a newborn receiving only breast milk and no other liquids or solids except for drops or syrups consisting of vitamins, minerals, or medicines,” data collected in hospitals and birthing centers can be pooled and analyzed. The Joint Commission also made it clear that breast milk feeding includes expressed mother’s milk as well as donor human milk, both of which may be fed to the infant by means other than suckling at the breast.

Now that the framework is in place, we can only hope that hospitals will give babies and breastfeeding the attention both deserve.