Released on: 10 March 2025
Parents in Lothian who have recently accessed infant feeding support are calling for services to be maintained and protected to benefit others in need.
The group of parents are all volunteers or have been supported by NCT’s Breastfeeding Buddies project on the postnatal and neonatal wards across the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and St John's Hospital in Livingston. Delivered by local parent volunteers, the project provides one-to-one, non-judgmental information and support for establishing and continuing breastfeeding, including support with positioning and attachment.
33-year-old Emma Boyd accessed the Lothian service after her baby Tristan was born prematurely at 36 weeks. After experiencing complications during labour and birth, Tristan was rushed to NICU with suspected sepsis, which impacted Emma’s plans to breastfeed as she was separated from him for around eight hours after the birth. Emma said:
“It was important for me to breastfeed, but our world had turned upside down. I wasn’t thinking about breastfeeding at that moment, I was thinking about recovering and about my son, so I’m forever grateful to the NCT volunteer who came onto the postnatal ward and talked to me about breastfeeding. She showed me how to hand express, we spoke about pumping and where we could get support.
“The midwives are wonderful, but they’re so stretched – they have a lot of people to look after. She took her time with us to answer our questions, she listened, gave us information and provided so much reassurance and encouragement. She was just there with us in such a vulnerable time.”
After her experience, Emma was inspired to train to become an NCT breastfeeding peer supporter so that other parents didn’t miss out on the experience of breastfeeding if they decided to.
Despite making a meaningful difference to the lives of parents like Emma, NCT Breastfeeding Buddies project is at risk, after learning it had no guaranteed funding from May 2025 due to recent changes to government funding for early years support for families.
“I feel so sad for those families who won’t be able to get the support they need. I know we can't help everyone, if anything we need more volunteers, but to reduce that support is so devastating,” Emma said.
Roslyn Scholarios, Scottish Breastfeeding Programme Manager at NCT Breastfeeding Buddies, said: “Breastfeeding can be a wonderful, but complicated journey, particularly in the early days. If services like ours close our doors, parents are at risk of losing vital breastfeeding support, adding further pressure on NHS services that are already overstretched.”
Since the programme started in 2019, NCT Breastfeeding Buddies has supported more than 7,000 families struggling with feeding their baby through peer-based one-to-one support in Lothian. 84% of parents agreed or strongly agreed that Breastfeeding Buddies support helped them feel more confident about breastfeeding their baby.
Statistics show that a high proportion of parents, especially women and birthing parents, do not get the support and information they need during their feeding journey – be that breastfeeding, expressing, using bottles, using formula milk, mixed feeding, introducing solids, stopping breastfeeding or bottle feeding, and variations of all of these. The UK is widely known for having some of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, with up to 90% of parents stopping breastfeeding before they want to.
As well as calling for the government to invest in community-based breastfeeding support, NCT is now actively looking for ways to keep the project running and give parents the support they need. To find out more or get involved, contact Roslyn at roslyn.scholarios@nct.org.uk
For more information about the NCT Breastfeeding Buddies project, please visit here.
