Translation Science and the Benefits of Breastfeeding, Research Paper Example

Nursing is a primary to the delivery of health care, as well as increasingly leading contributor to the evidence-based practice in healthcare settings. Translation science, or translational research, stresses the translation of the results or findings of fundamental discovery research into clinical application by carrying out clinical trials. It focuses more about clinical trials to test new healthcare-related discoveries. The component of translation science is that it improves the translation of fundamental research findings into routine clinical practice, where nurses can use these new findings to promote patient care. It entails knowledge translation to intervention development, that is, clinical trials. The translation is triggered by the knowledge and discovery gap that exists within healthcare settings. A gap thus remains one of the components that links research and the actual clinical practice amongst the nurses (Jaccard  & Jacoby, 2010).  Promoting breastfeeding or exclusive breastfeeding amongst patients in maternity in order to increase the breastfeeding rate is an important advanced practice translation science topic because of the proliferation of evidence that suggests that breastfeeding is a source of food and nourishment optimizes the overall health of babies. According to Galson (2009), five hundred mothers across the United States give birth to a newborn everyday, facing them with making a decision about how to feed their newborns Galson, 2009). The American Academy of Pediatrics Work Group on Breastfeeding recommends breastfeeding, positing that exclusive breastfeeding gives the newborn the ideal and ample nutrients at the correct percentages to enhance optimal development and growth for the first half year of the baby’s life (Schlliau & Wilson, 2005). In turn, mothers who breastfeed experience a slew of benefits as well, including the likelihood of burning off body fat they gained during pregnancy, which enhances their self images. Further studies reveal that breastfeeding mothers also exhibit lower incidences of ovarian cancer and premenopausal breast cancer (Beral et al. 2002).As a perinatal core measure, exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) is linked to breastfeeding for a protracted period of time. A review of the literature suggests that breastfeeding enhances health benefits, decreases the baby’s risk for obesity, diabetes, and respiratory infections such as asthma, among other health-related issues. Future research can be conducted to further amplify the validity of the findings in support of breastfeeding, which would translate into more effective interventions in both developing and non-developing countries in the future. Extant studies reveal that increasing the number of healthy newborns calls for the implementation of skin-to-skin contact between newborns and their mothers almost immediately after they  baby is born.

Review Of The Evidence

Studies conducted in developed countries were deployed in this systematic review and include meta-analysis, randomized and non-randomized trials, case-control studies, and prospective cohort on the impact of breastfeeding and pertinent outcomes. Moreover, the extant literature is nuanced in that it takes into account cultural practices and attitudes that impact the practice of breastfeeding. Nurses must remain culturally sensitive, especially to the Hispanic community. Articles published after 1990 in CINAHL and MEDLINE regarding breastfeeding practices within the Latina and Hispanic communities primarily broached the subject from a quantitative methodology due to the fact that acculturation remains a prominent barrier to DNP articulation (Schlickau & Wilson, 2005, p. 25) Evaluating the literature called for an inclusion criteria that focused on the outcomes of interest, meaning studies that focus on the health benefits and/or drawbacks of maternal breastfeeding, especially immediately after giving birth. The following is a systematic review of the evidence culled from articles from indexed journals published after 1990:

Proposed Management For Information Systems Change

Despite the fact that the health benefits of maternal breastfeeding are well documented in a growing corpus of literature, and the initiation rates have escalated during the past two decades, the majority of mothers wean prior to the recommended six month period postpartum rather than as a result of their own choice. Young, low-income, minority women are the least likely to breastfeed because they tend to be employed full time and maintain negative attitudes towards and perceptions of breastfeeding, often deciding late in their pregnancy how to broach the subject because they possess low confidence regarding their ability to breastfeed. While DNPs play a prominent role in the assistance of and influence over breastfeeding behaviors, as the literature underscores, the support a non-professional and/or a mother’s partner enhances the probability of new mothers adopting positive breastfeeding behaviors. Moreover, DNPs and other health care professionals can emerge as a negative derivation of support if they lack the knowledge or dexterity in imparting the skills and information necessary for new mothers to engage in and embrace breast feeding behaviors. Lack of knowledge spawns inconsistent or inaccurate advice from the DNP, and some hospital routines have time and again proven deleterious to positive breastfeeding behaviors. Despite the fact that DNP and other professional interventions that amplify the typical care that new mothers receive increase the rate of immediate breastfeeding after birth to at least two months, such strategies retain minimal currency as their effects remain quite limited. As such, it is unequivocal that better professional support is needed complemented by peer support interventions in order to promote positive breastfeeding attitudes and behaviors, especially amongst  working-class and ethnic minorities.

Translational research paradigms can be used to increase breastfeeding and exclusive breastfeeding in developing countries such as the United States. Studies show that mandated breastfeeding would yield better health, better care, and ultimately lower costs for families and hospitals alike because of the various health benefits for infants and mothers associated with the practice (Berwick et al., 2008). Experts estimate that over thirteen million dollars would be saved a year of at least ninety percent of breastfed their newborn for at least six months (AAP, 2012). Evidence-based practices that bolster arguments in favor of breastfeeding have dominated nursing literature, by 2010, only 3.5% of American hospitals implemented critical practices for successful breastfeeding programs as identified by the World Health Organizations during the 1990s (World Health Organization, 1998). One of this core principles include exclusive breastfeeding, or only feeding the newborn breast milk and nothing else unless medical problems required it, and has been supported by the World Health organization for over two decades. Recently, however, the U.S. department of Health and Human Services revisited and edited the Healthy People 2020 objectives in order to add a stipulation that reduce giving infants and newborns supplemental milk in hospitals (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2013). Moreover, the Department promulgated that by 2014, EBF constituted one out of the five stipulated perinatal core measures for any hospital or medical institution in which there were more than 1100 births every year.

Medical experts and researchers have deftly investigated the relationships between hospital and medical practices and breastfeeding outcomes. The practice of EBF has been linked with two main outcomes: mothers achieving their goals when breastfeeding (Perrine et al., 2012) and the increased amount of time spent breastfeeding (Holmes et al., 2011). Hospital management and administrators are challenged with the task of pinpointing and implementing various hospital practices that actively promote EBF once a baby is born. The core practice of skin-to-skin contact (SSC) between a newborn and its mother immediately after birth has demonstrated much promise for management in yielding optimal outcomes. Marin Gabriel et al. (2010) conducted a study in which 84.7% of the infants and mothers who engaged in SSC were exclusively breastfeeding  once they were discharged from the hospital, which seventy percent of individuals who did not do SSC. Mellin et al. (2012) further showed a comparison of mothers who did EBF prior and subsequent to SSC at two separate hospitals and ascertained that EBF practices increased in both locales. Increasing the number of newborns who are breastfed will unequivocally increase the quality of healthcare.

The proposed improvement process commenced with defining the problem at hand. EBF in healthy newborns for a six to seven month time frame would unequivocally enhance health benefits in newborns. A promising nursing intervention is offering professional services, especially those geared towards low-income, fully employed mothers proffered by DNPs who are well-versed in informatics, complemented with the support of other mothers who have already experienced breastfeeding. Professional and lay support for new mothers has emerged as the most effective intervention for socially disadvantaged and underprivileged new mothers.

Conclusion

Breast milk is unequivocally the natural and optimal nutrition for infants because it provides essential nutrients to infants while also benefitting mothers. Children who breastfeed experience less incidents of gastroenteritis, obesity, and respiratory problems such as asthma. Extant studies and literature reveal that breastfeeding is linked to reduced risk of a litany of diseases in both mothers and infants from developed nations. The majority of the data was gleaned from observational and empirical studies, so causality cannot be inferred from these findings alone. Moreover, there is a vast quality range of the corpus of evidence traversing differential health outcomes. Nonetheless, evidence on this topic points to the necessity to deploy translational paradigms in order to increase breastfeeding of newborns in hospitals almost immediately after they are born.

References

Beral,  V., Bull  D.,  Doll,  R.,  Peto,  R.,  &  Reeves,  G.  (2002).  Collaborative  group  on hormonal  factors  in breast cancer  and  breastfeeding:  Collaborative reanalysis of  individual  data from 47  epidemiological  studies  in 30 countries, including 50,302 women  with  breast cancer and 96,  9973  women without the disease. Lancet, 360, 187-195.

Fawcett, J., Newman, D. M. L., & McAllister, M. (2004). Advanced practice nursing and conceptual models of nursing. Nursing Science Quarterly, 17, 135–138.

Galson, S.(2009). The 25th Anniversary of the Surgeon General’s Workshop on Breastfeeding and Human Lactation: The Status of Breastfeeding Today. Public Health Report, 124(3). Retrieved July 31, 2015 from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2663869

Jaccard, J., & Jacoby, J. (2010). Science as an approach to understanding. In  Theory construction and model-building skills: A practical guide for social scientists (pp. 22-36). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Schlickau, J. & Wilson, M. (2005). Development and Testing of a Prenatal Breastfeeding Education Intervention for Hispanic Women. The Journal of Prenatal Education, 14(4). 24-35.