Our ‘Maternal well-being, infant feeding and return to paid work decisions’  project explores the well-being, opportunities and experiences of new mothers who want to continue to breastfeed on return to paid work. One potential barrier for continuing to breastfeed is return to work.  Our project aims to understand how mothers can be better supported to feed their child in the way that they want for as long they and/or child wishes to.  Have a look at the storyboard that we had designed in support of the project here. There are still opportunities to help us with our research:

Interviews

We have really enjoyed undertaking interviews with women about their return to work and infant feeding experience. We have had an amazing response and have done over 60 interviews. We would love to hear a few more experiences, particularly:

  • Those for which return to work has been a barrier for continuing to breastfeed as long as they wished, especially those who stopped before they returned to work
  • First time mothers who have not yet returned to work but are due to do so soon

If you are interested in taking part in an interview (interviews take place via MS Teams) please email s.l.jewell@reading.ac.uk

 

Focus Groups

We have loved running focus groups and would like to do another focus group with NHS workers, to explore experiences of return to work and infant feeding in the NHS.

If you are interested in taking part in this focus group (focus groups  take place via MS Teams) please email s.l.jewell@reading.ac.uk

 

Our Survey

We have great success  with our mother’s survey with over 1800 responses! We have re-opened the survey  (which will close in a couple of weeks) as we would like to hear a wider range of experiences. Anyone who has given birth in the UK since 2018 is eligible to take part in the survey, regardless of how you have fed your child or whether you have returned to work or not. We are particularly interested in hearing more responses from:

  • Those in routine, semi routine, manual and service jobs and other jobs where accommodating breastfeeding may not be as easy as in an office environment
  • Ethnic minorities
  • Those who returned to work before a year

As a thank you for filling in a survey you will have the opportunity to enter a prize draw to win a £25 high street voucher. We also encourage you to fill in the survey as we want to hear a range of experiences to help inform policy and practice to improve the working lives and well-being of mothers. You can fill in our survey here