Baby Friendly Initiative Support Worker

Job summary
The Baby Friendly Support Worker plays a key role in delivering high-quality, patient-centred care as part of a multi-disciplinary team. The post holder will provide compassionate, evidence-based infant feeding support to mothers, babies and families, helping them achieve their feeding goals while promoting close nurturing relationships.

Working with the Infant Feeding Lead and wider service, the role supports UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative accreditation by embedding best practice standards across care delivery. This includes contributing to audits, peer support education and service development.

The post holder will use specialist peer support and infant feeding knowledge to enhance the service, focusing on reducing health inequalities and improving outcomes for families. They will maintain their professional development through self-directed learning and contribute to continuous service improvement.

Please note: Due to recent changes in UK immigration and visa rules, this role is unlikely to be eligible for Skilled Worker visa sponsorship. Applicants who do not currently have the right to work in the UK may not be considered. Candidates requiring sponsorship should review the eligibility criteria on the gov.uk website before applying to assess their eligibility for a Certificate of Sponsorship for this role.

Main duties of the job
This is an exciting opportunity to join the Specialist Infant Feeding Team, working alongside the Healthy Child Programme in Crawley. The role would suit an individual with experience in infant feeding support and a passion for helping babies and their families achieve their feeding goals while promoting close, nurturing relationships.

Main duties include:

• Supporting the Infant Feeding Lead in maintaining UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative accreditation, including working with the wider Healthy Child Programme team, undertaking parent and staff audits, and contributing to continuous quality improvement.
• Supporting the Peer Support Coordinator in the delivery and development of the peer support programme.
• Working alongside Healthy Child Programme staff within Infant Feeding MILK drop-in sessions, providing support and advice to families across a range of community venues throughout the city.

This role offers the opportunity to make a meaningful difference to the health and wellbeing of infants and their families while working within a supportive and passionate multidisciplinary team.

About us
We are the main provider of NHS community services across East and West Sussex, with 6,000 staff serving 1.3 million people. We deliver essential care to adults and children, helping them manage their health, avoid hospital admissions, and reduce hospital stays.

Our Trust vision is to provide excellent care at the heart of the community. We offer opportunities across medical, clinical, support, and corporate services.

Why work for us?

• Positive 2024 NHS Staff Survey results, highlighting compassionate leadership and wellbeing
• Varied environments: community hospitals, patients' homes, and bases across Sussex
• Flexible working options: part-time, flexi-time, annualised hours, and flexi-retirement
• Excellent training, development, and research opportunities
• Accredited Living Wage Employer, we ensure fair pay for all our staff
• Cost-effective workplace nurseries in Crawley, Hove, and Brighton
• Active EMBRACE, Disability & Wellbeing, LGBTQIA+, and Religion & Belief networks
• Level 3 Disability Confident Leader and Veteran Aware Trust

Our values -- Compassionate Care, Working Together, Achieving Ambitions, Delivering Excellence --guide everything we do.

We embrace diversity and encourage applications from all backgrounds, particularly from ethnically diverse, disabled, and LGBTQIA+ individuals. We aim to create an inclusive environment and support reasonable adjustments during recruitment.

This post may close early if sufficient applications are received.

Job responsibilities
Working in partnership, the post-holder communicates effectively with patients and their family/carers, the multi-disciplinary team and other key stakeholders on a range of complex health care matters, issues, ideas and situations.

b) Acts as an information resource for patients, multidisciplinary colleagues and other stakeholders. Responsible for signposting and referring individuals, families, carers and communities to the most appropriate agencies/services to support their needs.

c) The post-holder may experience challenge to engage and agree with the patient, families, or carers for any treatment plan. They may also experience resistance from other colleagues to an agreed action, or treatment option. Strong negotiating and influencing skills may be required.

d) To be able to provide alternative communication strategies to ensure additional barriers to understanding are met.

Main tasks

• Holistic Infant feeding assessment and care planning including risk assessment.
• Individualised care and the promotion of self-care. Developing individualised programmes to educate and empower patients, carers, families and staff
• Safe and effective review and referral to the appropriate member of the multidisciplinary team
• To share impartial, evidence-based information about infant feeding with antenatal and postnatal women to enable them to make a fully informed choice as to how they feed and care for their babies in accordance with the Trust Infant Feeding Policy, associated guidelines, and Baby Friendly Standards.
• Professional development as required to maintain area of practice, and as negotiated in supervision.
• An awareness of health, safety and security risks
• Engagement in service provision and the support of any change process that impacts service
• Support the Peer Support Coordinator with the peer support programme.

Person Specification
Qualifications
Essential

• Qualification relevant to Infant feeding
• Teaching skills / group facilitation gained through specialist training or equivalent experience.
• Level 4 Foundation degree

Experience
Essential

• Experience of working with parents with young children in either paid or voluntary capacity
• Experience of delivering or volunteering with community-based health programmes.
• Experience of delivering breastfeeding peer support programmes.

Skills and Knowledge
Essential

• Recent experience of supporting women to breastfeed.
• Good understanding of health inequalities and community development principles.
• Communication skills including managing barriers and difficult conversations
• Ability to travel across Trust locations, if required

Desirable

• An ability to facilitate groups and help to develop and deliver training packages

This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.