Meeting of the Parliament 23 January 2024
I will come to that idea later in my speech. We have done more than just research; we have put things in place, including family nurse partnerships.
The evidence is strongest regarding the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months of life. To fully realise the potential that breastfeeding has for our nation’s health, we must listen to and act on that evidence. In November, I and my colleague the Minister for Children, Young People and Keeping the Promise launched the early child development transformational change programme in order to focus on driving change in children’s earliest years. Nutrition and health are key pillars of that programme. According to the World Health Organization, breastfeeding—alongside the quality of a young child’s diet—sets a trajectory for lifelong health and wellbeing.
Collective efforts across whole systems are needed to deliver on our ambitions to improve child health outcomes. In recent years, Scotland has seen a noticeable and positive shift in the rates of breastfeeding at birth and beyond, both among younger mothers and among those from more deprived areas, whose rates were historically low. We now have our highest recorded rate of breastfeeding at age six to eight weeks, which stands at 47 per cent. That is evidence that breastfeeding inequalities are reducing. That amazing achievement has been driven by the collective efforts of infant feeding teams across our national health service and their third sector partners to focus on what works best. I congratulate everyone involved, especially the mothers themselves.
Thanks to those efforts, alongside our additional investment of £9 million over the past five years, we now know what can and is making the difference that we want to see in Scotland. That investment has had some tangible long-lasting impacts, for example in NHS Ayrshire and Arran, where a peer-support project has been integrated into the local infant feeding offer, and in NHS Lothian, where targeted interventions were tested in one locality with low breastfeeding rates and were then successfully scaled up.
We also continue to invest in our national donor milk bank, which is the only one of its kind in the UK, so that it can innovate, expand and continue to provide a safe supply of breast milk to some of our sickest and smallest babies. I am grateful to those who continue to provide donor breast milk to support that work.