NHS Grampian achieves UNICEF Baby Friendly Gold Award

NHS Grampian’s maternity services have been accredited with the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative GOLD Award. 

This follows a robust UNICEF assessment and demonstrates that teams have been maintaining Baby Friendly Achieving Sustainability standards for at least two years. 

Lead midwife for maternity and women’s services at NHG Grampian, Liz Cheung explained: “It’s all about supporting pregnant women, new mums and families with breastfeeding and developing a close and loving relationship with their baby. This accreditation means we’ve embedded some really important standards across maternity, neonatal, health visiting and wider services for children and families. It is led by our fantastic specialist team and supported by leaders and colleagues across all services.”

Infant feeding coordinator Yasmin Roberts added: “After going through our reaccreditation with UNICEF in 2022 and 2023, we wanted to go for GOLD. To achieve this award, staff, mothers and our team and management were all audited along with a portfolio of evidence. It’s a great achievement for NHS Grampian as it shows the commitment from our organisation, leadership as well as staff to continue to provide the future generations of babies, mothers and families with high quality care and support.”

UNICEF will continue to assess NHS Grampian’s efforts annually to ensure teams are continuing to strive for quality improvements to be made.

Yasmin commented: “We are all exceptionally proud of our service and will continue to strengthen our team and care provision going forward. We’re planning to have a UNICEF celebration where we are given our award soon which will be exciting and we’re just really passionate about keeping this momentum going.”

Hugh Bishop, NHS Grampian’s medical director who is also a consultant paediatric oncologist, shared his thoughts on the good news. He said: “This work helps us make sure staff have a thorough understanding of infant feeding and the importance of early relationships to childhood development. Congratulations to our fantastic infant feeding team who are empowering staff with the skills and knowledge to support parent-infant relationship building, which we know makes a huge difference to children, young people and indeed adults in the longer term.”