Researchers from the Faculties of Health Sciences and Psychology of the University of La Laguna, and the Canary Health Service, have determined the indicators that can help healthcare professionals so that a mother can prolong the period of breastfeeding.
The research has been carried out by Coral Castro, Aythamy González, José Miguel Díaz, Irene Cabrera and Marta Díaz and consists of analyzing the validated scale to measure the self-efficacy of mothers in breastfeeding, called Breastfeeding Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form (BSES-SF), as reported by the teaching center.
This study aimed to verify whether it was possible to group the indicators of this scale into different components, analyze whether its score changes throughout the first months of breastfeeding and whether it is related to early abandonment of it.
The study was conducted at the University Hospital of the Canary Islands (Tenerife) and the Doctor José Molina Orosa University Regional Hospital (Lanzarote), with the participation of 272 first-time mothers.
At 48 hours after delivery and at three and six months, the type of breastfeeding, the scale of self-efficacy in breastfeeding and other sociodemographic and clinical variables were recorded.
Corroborating previous studies, the research group found that the score on the BSES-SF scale increased throughout breastfeeding, and that the increase was greater in mothers with exclusive or predominant breastfeeding.
It was also found that it was possible to differentiate three components in the scale: safety in breastfeeding, competence to face breastfeeding and its possible difficulties, and motivation to breastfeed.
The motivation component was the most stable of the three, without significant changes throughout the follow-up period, and the safety component initially had low values and increased rapidly between 3 and 6 months, which is possibly related to the fact that mothers are gaining experience.
On the other hand, both the safety and competence components reached significantly higher values at three months in the participants in the study who continued with exclusive breastfeeding, compared to those who had switched to partial breastfeeding, that is, who supplemented breast milk with an infant formula.
According to the research, the competence component is the one that best predicts the maintenance of breastfeeding at 6 months, with an even greater influence than the level of maternal education.
Based on these results, the research group believes that interventions to improve maternal breastfeeding rates should be focused on mothers at higher risk of early abandonment of breastfeeding, and include strategies based on their individual needs of the mothers, focusing especially on those aimed at empowering them and increasing their level of competence.
