Infant and young child feeding: counselling cards for health workers

Overview

Breastfeeding and appropriate, safe, and timely complementary feeding are fundamental to the health and development of children and important for the health of their mothers. All health workers who care for women and children during the postnatal period and beyond have a key role to play in establishing and sustaining breastfeeding and appropriate complementary feeding. This course, which is an update of the version published in 2005, was designed to help provide training to all those involved in infant feeding counselling, in all countries, in the skills needed to support and protect breastfeeding and good complementary feeding practices.

The Infant and young child feeding counselling: an integrated course includes a Director’s guide, Trainer’s guide and Participant’s manual. Additional tools include: Course handoutsGuidelines for follow-up after trainingSupportive supervision/mentoring and monitoring and an accompanying toolkit; a slide set for the trainer; this set of 24 Counselling cards and Guidance on the use of counselling cards. The course includes 79 sessions arranged within 8 modules, covering a range of topics, including breastfeeding, complementary feeding, growth assessment and monitoring, HIV and infant feeding, and infant and young child feeding counselling. Course facilitators can decide which sessions to cover, depending on the specific learning needs of the health workers in your community.

This set of Counselling cards has been adapted from the Community infant and young child feeding counselling package and form part of the updated training course. They were developed for course participants and depict key infant and young child feeding concepts and behaviours for health workers to share with mothers, fathers, grandparents and other caregivers.

WHO Team
Food & Nutrition Action in Health Systems (AHS), Nutrition and Food Safety (NFS)
Editors
World Health Organization & United Nations Children's Fund (‎‎‎‎UNICEF)‎‎‎‎
Number of pages
29
Reference numbers
WHO Reference Number: WHO/HEP/NFS/21.24
Copyright