The NDC Lactation Fellowship: upskilling leaders in lactation medicine

Upskilling leaders in lactation medicine

The NDC Lactation Fellowship is for NDC Accredited health professionals who are interested in

• The integration of lactation medicine research as foundational in each domain of infant care: development, cry-fuss problems, sleep, perinatal and infant mental health. NDC does not attempt to co-opt these domains into the field of 'lactation medicine', but acknowledges they interact together, each a vital part of the complex adaptive system of the mother-infant pair, and lactation medicine at the foundations.

• Upskilling in genuinely holistic clinical practice: working from the evolutionary premise that effective clinical breastfeeding support requires clinical expertise in the domains of unsettled infant behaviour and perinatal and infant mental health, so that breastfeeding isn't considered separately from those other domains.

• Leadership in education within their own communities and countries concerning clinical breastfeeding and lactation support and infant care

• Mitigation of overdiagnosis and overtreatment in the field of clinical breastfeeding support and infant care, in the face of worsening trends to overdiagnose and overtreat internationally

• Rigorous intellectual engagement with existing research, including the capacity to critically analyse

  • Research study methodologies

  • Current trends in breastfeeding medicine and lactation consultancy practices and education, including analysis of how we can contribute to the development of our collective human intelligence in the field of lactation medicine (consensus clinical guidelines, education for colleagues, research), as we make contributions in our own regions

• Evolutionary bodywork: sophisticated clinical skills for empowering mother and baby as single entity comprised of many complex physiological systems, including mechanobiological systems, which dynamically interact in real time (gestalt fit & hold intervention for mother-baby pairs), for the repair of

  • Nipple pain and damage

  • Fussy infant behaviour at the breast

• Thinking about how to interrogate and negotiate

  • The interface between market-driven business forces or pressures, conflicts of interest, and desire to provide genuinely evidence-based clinical breastfeeding support in primary care or hospital settings

  • Ideology in lactation medicine: what is it, and how does it impact upon clinicians and the families they work with?

  • Orthodoxy and heterodoxy (power, status and rhetoric as determinants of the kind of knowledge that garners institutional and policy support) in the fields of breastfeeding medicine and clinical lactation support, drawing on the work of Professor Trisha Greenhalgh and others (3,4)

• Thorough understanding of how implementation science applies to the field of lactation medicine.

Related resources

About The NDC Lactation Fellowship

The NDC Lactation Fellowship: what makes it different

The NDC Lactation Fellowship: cost and comparisons

NDC Lactation Fellowship Curriculum (Transitioning from interim 2024-25 curriculum to the final 2026 curriculum)

The Lactation Medicine Lab - live online 2026

Guest Speaker program

Selected references

(1) Stuebe AM. We need patient-centred research in breastfeeding medicine. Breastfeeding Medicine. 2021;16(4):349-350.

(2) Rutherford C, Boehnke JR. Introduction to the special section "Reducing research waste in (health-related) quality of life research". Quality of Life Research. 2022;31:2881-2887.

(3) Greenhalgh T, Ozbilgin M, Contandriopoulos D. Orthodoxy, illusio, and playing the scientific game: a Bourdieusian analysis of infection control science in the COVID-19 pandemic. Wellcome Open Research. 2021;6(126): https://doi.org/10.12688/wellcomeopenres.16855.12683.

(4) Greenhalgh T, Russell J. Reframing evidence synthesis as rhetorical action in the policy making drama. Healthcare Policy. 2005;1:31-39.