Celebrating our Quality Awards winners: Infant Feeding Team and Baby Friendly Champions
As we continue to celebrate our Quality Awards 2025 winners, today our spotlight turns to the brilliant Infant Feeding Team and Baby Friendly Champions. The team took home the Change Maker award for reaching high standards through innovation, and collaboration across services.
The team recently achieved Gold accreditation in UNICEF UK Baby Friendly standards, a prestigious accolade that not many services achieve.
UNICEF's Baby Friendly Initiative aims to raise the standard of care for all babies by focusing on supporting parents in building close, loving relationships with their babies and having the best feeding practices for long-term health and development. The evidence-based standards for maternity, neonatal, community and hospital-based children's services and universities, provide a roadmap for transforming care.
Emma Goulding, Infant Feeding Clinical Lead said:
Our priority is supporting families with infant feeding and relationship building. We achieved the gold Baby Friendly accreditation thanks to our Infant Feeding Team working collaboratively with the 0-19 service in the West, Best Start in Life in the North the Thriving and Nurturing Families Pathway Teams. We're so proud of everyone and really grateful to everyone that contributed.
Katy Coles, Infant Feeding Strategy Lead said:
My predecessor Diana Mair started working on the Baby Friendly accreditation process over 11 years ago, and Emma and I are proud to have continued this work. Our Baby Friendly Champions all work clinically in a variety of teams within the service and have a passion for promoting and protecting breastfeeding. We would like to thank them for their support.
The Baby Friendly Gold report recognised the following attributes:
- Baby friendly care is a priority for the service
- The team are dedicated to giving every child the best start in life
- Families are supported at every stage of their baby's feeding journey
- Robust leadership puts Baby Friendly standards into action
- Mothers are supported across settings
- The Infant Feeding Team are working with Family Hubs in the North and West, to further embed Baby Friendly care into the community
- The team work closely with external partners
- The whole team is commended
Every Mum that the Baby Friendly Team spoke to said that they were always treated with kindness and compassion, they said:
"The Infant Feeding team are amazing!"
"The staff went above and beyond."
"This is my first experience giving birth in this country and the staff were amazing!"
Congratulations once again to the incredible Infant Feeding team and Baby Friendly Champions on all your hard work. Stay tuned for our next updates celebrating our Quality Awards 2025 winners.