Pharmacists as an Underutilized Resource for Improving Community-Level Support of Breastfeeding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With their highly visible roles in the community, frequent interactions with soon-to-be and new parents, and knowledge of medication safety, pharmacists can be a key component in breastfeeding promotion and support. A review of the literature showed that pharmacists have poor knowledge but positive attitudes toward breastfeeding and that pharmacy practices are variable and mostly guided by personal experience. A review of 58 health professional organizations' English-language infant feeding/breastfeeding policy statements showed that no US pharmacists' association has a position statement, as exists for professional pharmacist organizations in Canada and Australia. We explored pharmacists' interactions with mothers before and after birth and possible opportunities to expand pharmacists' roles in the promotion and support of breastfeeding. Barriers to meeting unmet needs of breastfeeding mothers were identified in order to plan strategies for implementing programs to address these barriers. Through input obtained from pharmacy and breastfeeding experts and from information available in the published literature, good matches between unmet needs and capabilities were identified in (a) provision of health promotion resources and public awareness campaigns, (b) assistance with purchase of breastfeeding products and pumps, and (c) provision of information, support, and referral related to commonly encountered difficulties as well as medication use during lactation. Absence of adequate breastfeeding knowledge was identified as a crucial barrier. Leveraging pharmacists to address unmet preventive health needs is especially important as we strive to align resources to support healthy behaviors in our current health care delivery environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".