Breastfeeding and appropriate, safe and timely complementary feeding are fundamental to the health and development of children, and important for the health of their mothers. All health workers who care for women and children during the postnatal period and beyond have a key role to play in establishing and sustaining breastfeeding and appropriate complementary feeding. This guide, which is an update of the version published in 2005, enables course directors to create a customized training package that will respond directly to the specific learning needs of their health workers. The training modules cover a range of topics, including breastfeeding, complementary feeding, growth assessment and monitoring, HIV and infant feeding, and infant and young child feeding counselling.

This publication is a training resource that deals with the period prior to successful weaning when a child continues to receive breast milk but also needs increasing amounts of addtional complementary foods to ensure healthy development. It is intended as a practical learning tool for all those responsible for the health and nutrition of young children, particularly health and nutrition workers, and their trainers.

This book sets out the facts and lines of action that enable health services to achieve their full potential as part of society's first line of support to breast-feeding. Against the larger backdrop of community attitudes that variously sustain or restrain breast-feeding the 32-page booklet translates the most up-to-date knowledge and practical experience about lactation into precise recommendations on care for mothers before during and after pregnancy and delivery. The statement begins by listing 10 important steps to successful breast-feeding intended for application in every facility providing maternity services and care for newborn infants. Readers are told that mothers should be helped to breast-feed within a half hour of birth that newborn infants should be given no food or drink other than breast milk unless medically indicated and that rooming-in should be practised 24 hours a day. Particularly practical is a section devoted to individual care, which spells out procedures to follow at five important stages from prenatal history-taking and counseling through care during and after delivery to what to do when a mother is discharged from the health care facility. Readers are informed that the risk of neonatal infection is in fact greater in the closed environment of a nursery than when infants remain with their mothers and that exclusive on-demand breast-feeding should be the norm throughout the clinic or hospital stay. The booklet concludes with a 20-point check-list that maternity wards and clinics can use to gauge how well they are protecting promoting and supporting breast-feeding.

WHO and UNICEF jointly developed this global strategy to focus world attention on the impact that feeding practices have on the nutritional status, growth and development, health, and thus the very survival of infants and young children. The strategy is the result of a comprehensive two-year participatory process. It is based on the evidence of nutrition's significance in the early months and years of life, and of the crucial role that appropriate feeding practices play in achieving optimal health outcomes. The strategy is intended as a guide for action; it identifies interventions with a proven positive impact; it emphasizes providing mothers and families the support they need to carry out their crucial roles, and it explicitly defines the obligations and responsibilities in this regards of governments, international organizations, and other concerned parties.