Public Reporting of Hospital-Specific Breastfeeding Measures A Qualitative Study of Hospital Staff and Administrators

Background:Establishing breastfeeding in the first days of an infant’s life is important for longer term success in breastfeeding. In 2009, New York State (NYS) was the second state to require maternity care facilities to collect infant feeding information and to publicly disseminate hospital-specific infant feeding statistics. Public reporting of these statistics as performance measures is a strategy to prompt hospitals to improve breastfeeding support.Objective:This qualitative study sought to explore how maternity care administrators and clinical staff responded to the mandate for publicly reported performance measures and whether they used this information to improve maternity care practices.Methods:This study used a stratified random sample of NYS hospitals with maternity care units. Participants were recruited by email and telephone calls. A total of 25 hospitals participated in the study, and 37 hospital administrators and staff completed in-depth interviews by telephone. The interviews were analyz...