Amber Valentine
Baptist Health Lexington, USA
Title: Feeding Difficulties in High Risk Infant Populations
Biography
Biography: Amber Valentine
Abstract
The Speech-Language Pathologist is often seen in settings as the expert for infants with feeding difficulties, predominantly for bottle feeding or feeding aversions. In today’s society, with breast feeding becoming more and more “the norm,” the SLP has become more involved in the area of feeding assessment with not only bottle fed infants but infants who are attempting breast feeding as well. The SLP brings an interesting background to the area of breast feeding with a knowledge of the oral mechanism, infant respiratory system, and swallowing mechanisms. In many NICU and pediatric facilities, the SLP is now providing pre-feeding readiness assessments on infants, and by doing these, allowing many infants to get in on the ground floor with breast feeding. These infants in the NICU and early pediatric setting can be provided with more opportunities to become successful breast feeders, especially those infants who were previously thought to be unable to complete this task. As the literature shows, it is so critical to provide human breast milk as soon as possible to these fragile infants in NICU and other pediatric populations, by allowing them to have earlier opportunities at the breast, they will be more likely to become not only successful breast feeders, but more successful feeders for a lifetime. This presentation will discuss the role of the SLP in lactation clinically, as well as how we can work together between disciplines to improve breastfeeding success.