Knowsley Council’s Early Years service has achieved UNICEF’s Baby Friendly accreditation – Stage 1.
This means that the Early Years service has created policies and procedures to support the implementation of the standards and these have been externally assessed by UNICEF UK and found to be adequate.
The UNICEF UK Baby Friendly Initiative enables public services to better support families with feeding and developing close and loving relationships so that all babies get the best possible start in life.
The Baby Friendly award is a nationally recognised mark of quality care. The programme supports services by:
- Setting standards which provide a roadmap for sustainable improvements
- Providing training and personalised support to help services implement the standards
- Assessing progress by measuring the skills and knowledge of health professionals, and interviewing mothers to hear about their personal experiences of care.
Through the programme, there are three stages which are externally assessed by UNICEF UK.
The Early Years service’s priority is to ensure that children get the very best start in life. As part of this work, a Family Hub has been created which brings professionals, services and support together under one roof to make them easily accessible to parents and carers.
The hub provides services that help give expectant parents and babies a great start to life, supporting parents through parenting classes, learning support, midwifery, health visiting, infant feeding advice, child development support and perinatal mental health support. The aim is to make services easier to navigate and more joined-up, ensuring families receive the right service at the right time.
The council has also introduced an extensive borough-wide campaign to promote breastfeeding, highlight the support available to new and expecting parents and reinforce Knowsley’s commitment to becoming a truly breastfeeding-friendly borough. Support includes the Knowsley Breastfeeding Buddy Programme providing invaluable face-to-face and online support for Knowsley families, both antenatally and postnatally. There’s also over 55 business and venues that have signed up to the Breastfeeding pledge, and proudly display the pledge making it easy for breastfeeding families to identify supportive environments.
Cllr David Lonergan, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services, said: “I’m delighted that our Early Years service has been nationally recognised by UNICEF for their incredible work with children and families across the Borough.
“They provide invaluable help and support to ensure that children in Knowsley get the very best start in life and staff in the service should feel incredibly proud of their achievement. Well done!”