Educating Neonatal Nurses Using a Video Breastfeeding Curriculum

Background and Objectives: Breastfeeding is the standard for feeding newborns and infants. Physicians play a vital role as advocates for breastfeeding in our hospitals, practices, and communities. However, physicians are not always the first-line caregivers for our mothers and babies during the critical first days to help establish breastfeeding and educate new mothers. This essential role is often filled by our neonatal nurses who spend an entire shift in close contact with families providing an opportunity to teach many new skills. We hypothesize that by using standardized patient encounter videos, knowledge and comfort level of this population of nurses in handling common breastfeeding problems will improve. Methods: Our study population consisted of neonatal nurses at one academic institution. We distributed a pre-test to assess breastfeeding knowledge and attitudes. The assessments consisted of the Breastfeeding Attitudes and Behavior Assessment (BABA) and a knowledge multiple choice test. After these were completed, the neonatal nurses viewed a breastfeeding video curriculum showing 3 standardized physician patient encounters dealing with Sore Nipples, Jaundice, and Perceived Low Milk Supply. A post-test was then completed to re-assess knowledge and attitudes immediately after the session. Results: We demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in the mean post-test correct answers for knowledge questions by 1.86 (SD = 2.37) and attitude questions by 1.24 (SD =1.48) from the pre-test values after viewing the three standardized patient encounter videos. Conclusions: Our study highlights the importance of further education of our nursing staff to better serve our patient's needs as an accessible and helpful resource for families. We have demonstrated that a video-based curriculum of standardized patient encounters is an effective means of increasing nurse knowledge of and improving attitudes towards breastfeeding.