The Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding are a set of evidence-based practices developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF. They guide how hospitals and health care providers can support families with feeding their babies.
These steps are the foundation of the Baby-Friendly Initiative and help ensure that all families receive respectful, consistent, and informed care.
WHO has called upon all facilities providing maternity and newborn services worldwide to implement the Ten Steps as a standard of care.
In Canada, the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding have been adapted to include community health services, reflecting the continuum of care within the Canadian healthcare system. Facilities seeking BFI designation in Canada, except in the province of Quebec, are required to meet the Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding in Canada, as outlined in the Baby-Friendly Initiative Implementation Guideline.
The Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding are:
Critical management procedures:
1a. Comply fully with the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes and relevant World Health Assembly resolutions.
1b. Have a written infant feeding policy that is routinely communicated to staff and parents.
1c. Establish ongoing monitoring and data-management systems.
2. Ensure that staff have sufficient knowledge, competence and skills to support breastfeeding.
Key clinical practices:
3. Discuss the importance and management of breastfeeding with pregnant women and their families.
4. Facilitate immediate and uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact and support mothers to initiate breastfeeding as soon as possible after birth.
5. Support mothers to initiate and maintain breastfeeding and manage common difficulties.
6. Do not provide breastfed newborns any food or fluids other than breast milk, unless medically indicated.
7. Enable mothers and their infants to remain together and to practise rooming-in 24 hours a day.
8. Support mothers to recognize and respond to their infants’ cues for feeding.
9. Counsel mothers on the use and risks of feeding bottles, teats and pacifiers.
10. Coordinate discharge so that parents and their infants have timely access to ongoing support and care.
Learn more
- WHO: Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding
- Implementation guidance: protecting, promoting, and supporting breastfeeding in facilities providing maternity and newborn services: the revised Baby-friendly Hospital Initiative 2018
