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Advice from Bexley Health Visitors

Posted By PurpleRose

"Advice from Bexley Health Visitors"

About: Bromley Healthcare / Bexley 0 to 19 Children’s Public Health Service

(as a service user),

I just wanted to feedback about how disappointed I have been in the quality of advice given by the Bexley health visitors service. Since my 14 month old was born, I have seen 6 different health visitors and I have to say that I have been given a lot of misinformed, outdated and sometimes potentially dangerous advice by nearly all of the health visitors I have encountered.

For example, I was told to stop breastfeeding my six month old baby at night because it was simply ‘a bad habit’. This goes against recommendations from the NHS, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF and every single breastfeeding organisation that exists. I was also told by two different health visitors to sleep train my baby once they were over 6 months to stop them waking at night. This also goes against advice from the NHS and World Heakth Organisation and it is widely known that sleep training causes elevated cortisol levels in infants which is harmful to their developing brains, and psychologists highlight how sleep training is distressing to infants and can have negative emotional effects, as well as breaking the secure attachment cycle with their caregiver. It is quite frankly shocking that a health visitor would recommend such a damaging and unsafe practice.

I have also found that breastfeeding advice from the health visiting service has been, in general, ill informed and patchy and I have always had to check their advice by doing my own research. In short, I am disappointed that a service which costs so much to the NHS has not added any benefit to my child’s first year of life. In fact, if I had followed the advice given, it would have potentially been very damaging.  

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Responses

Response from Julie Miller, Patient Experience Lead, Bromley Healthcare 5 years ago
Julie Miller
Patient Experience Lead,
Bromley Healthcare

Submitted on 01/08/2018 at 13:29
Published on Care Opinion at 14:16

Dear' Purple Rose'

I am very sorry to read of the issues that you have encountered.

Please I do hope that you will contact me at the following email address Julie.miller5@nhs.net and provide me with your name and contact telephone or email details so that I can forward your concerns to the Service Lead for Health visiting.

Thank you so much

Julie

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Response from Julie Miller, Patient Experience Lead, Bromley Healthcare 5 years ago
We are preparing to make a change
Julie Miller
Patient Experience Lead,
Bromley Healthcare

Submitted on 07/08/2018 at 13:50
Published on Care Opinion on 08/08/2018 at 09:31

Message from the service Lead for Bexley 0 to 19 Children’s Public Health Service

Dear Purple Rose

The Bexley 0 to 19 Children’s Public Health Service are very sorry to hear about the problems that you have encountered with the advice you were given. We are very disappointed that any mother should receive this outdated advice from any members of our team. The Service will be investigating this fully to see what training and support these members of staff need.

We would like to reassure the mothers of Bexley that we endeavour to maintain the highest possible advice and support for breast feeding. Staff working in the Bexley 0 to 19 Children’s Public Health Service have achieved Unicef Baby Friendly stages 1 and 2 which required all staff (including any temporary staff) to undergo study days on the importance of breast and responsive feeding. We had to obtain an 80% compliance to achieve these awards www.unicef.org.uk/babyfriendly/accreditation).

Presently we are working towards our Stage 3 accreditation with Unicef and hope to achieve this in 2019.

We welcome feedback as it gives us a chance to improve our services. If the person who posted the feedback would like to contact us offline via

Julie.miller5@nhs.net providing your name and contact details we can discuss the issues personally. Your details will not of course be published on this forum.

Thank you once again.

Service Lead Bexley 0-19

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