BONTOC, Mountain Province – Twenty-two health and nutrition providers in this municipality were recently trained on maternal nutrition and infant feeding.
The Maternal Nutrition Infant Young Child Feeding (MNIYCF) Peer Counselling Training aimed to capacitate members of the Breastfeeding Support Group by enhancing their knowledge in the delivery of services that will ensure an increase in the number of babies who are exclusively breastfed for six months.
The training focused on services on nutrition, health, early learning, and social services for pregnant women and children below two years old.
These include key nutrition interventions for the first six months to include adequate nutrition and care during pregnancy, support for exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life, giving complementary food starting at six months, and continued breastfeeding up to two years and even beyond.
The participants are the midwives in the 16 barangays of Bontoc and personnel from the Municipal Health Office (MHO) who interact with pregnant women, mothers, and their infants and young children in the community.
Bontoc Mayor Jerome Tudlong, Jr. said promotion of health and nutrition is one of the administration’s priority programs.
Councilor Benedict Odsey II who chairs the committee on health encouraged the participants to put into practice the knowledge they gained from the training in the delivery of quality services to the community.
Municipal Nutrition Action Officer Venous Faith Cofulan said the training is in line with the National and World Breastfeeding Awareness Month in August and in consonance with Republic Act 11148 or the Kalusugan at Nutrisyong Mag-Nanay Act. The law seeks to scale up the national and local health and nutrition programs through a strengthened integrated strategy for maternal, neonatal, and child health and nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life, where national policies are streamlined across Department of Health offices and bureaus to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in programming and resource allocation. – Alpine L. Killa-Malwagay