HEALTH LINK

DOH-CHDWV Conducts
Reg’l Training On IYCF Counseling

By Cecille dela Rosa De Lemos

The DOH Center for Health Development – Western Visayas (CHDWV) conducted a Regional Training on Infant and Young Child Feeding (ICYF) Counseling: An Integrated Course on August 27-31, 2007 at Iloilo Grand Hotel, Iloilo City. Ms. Marilyn T. Tumilba, Nutritionist-Dietitian IV of DOH regional office headed the group of facilitators of that training.
The five-day training was attended by breastfeeding coordinators, nutritionist-dietitians, public health and hospital-based nurses, provincial and city health officers. It aimed to train the professional health workers the basic counseling skills to enable them to give mothers the support to carry out the WHO recommended practices for their infants and young children from birth to 24 months of age, and to counsel and support HIV-infected mothers to choose and carry out an appropriate method for the first two years of life.
As a global public health recommendation, infants should be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life and to provide safe and appropriate complementary foods with continued breastfeeding up to two years of age or beyond.
The WHO and UNICEF developed the Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding to revitalize the world attention to the impact that feeding practices have on the nutritional status, growth, development, health and survival of infants and young children. Malnutrition is responsible directly or indirectly, for 54 percent of the 10.9 million deaths annually among children under five. Over 2/3 of these deaths, which are often associated with inappropriate feeding practices, occur during the first year of life. /MP