About Baby Café

Baby Café is a growing national network of drop-ins providing breastfeeding information and support for mums and their families throughout pregnancy and early parenthood.

Developed in 2000 Baby Café is a health professional-led drop-in with a remit to increase breastfeeding rates in ‘hard-to-reach’ areas. The services offered are continually being developed.

• Annually Baby Café supports nearly 12,000 mums
• 55% of mums visit their Baby Café drop-in more than once and 22% visit five or more times
• On average each drop-in offers 48 sessions per year

Baby Café now forms a part of NCT group.

Public health and breastfeeding

• Baby Café can help you to meet your targets of increasing breastfeeding rates at 6-8 weeks
• This universal service is accessed by families who are considered ‘hard to reach’
• The Baby Café toolkit and resources provide facilitators with a clear and consistent model which has been proven to work successfully in a variety of settings
• Baby Café meets Unicef’s Baby Friendly Initiative standards

"To see 20+ mothers in two hours and meet health outcomes for that family and community from many perspectives was excellent resource management.” -Baby Café Facilitator

Commissioning a Baby Café

Baby Cafés are facilitated by health visitors, midwives or lactation consultants. Baby Café Locals are facilitated by either accredited breastfeeding counsellors from ABM, BfN, LLLGB and NCT or band 3-5 health practitioners with additional professional development in supporting breastfeeding women.

All drop-ins ideally include a team of complementary support staff such as peer supporters, general volunteers and family support workers.

Service packages can be tailored to meet specific local needs, budgets and staff resources. This can range from supporting your locality to deliver a Baby Café drop-in using in-house staff and resources; to full service provision including consultation and assessment of needs, staffing, promotion, project management and evaluation.

To find out more please contact:
commissionedservices@nct.org.uk
0300 330 0700