Let's Strengthen What Works

“Breastfeeding for a Sustainable Start in Life:  Strengthen What Works,” is the theme for World Breastfeeding Week 2026.  This year's goals include “tracking progress” in breastfeeding and evaluating its impact on “nutrition, food security, and poverty reduction” while highlighting what is successful and what lessons we can learn from different efforts. 

Why Track Progress with Breastfeeding Rates?

Tracking breastfeeding rates helps us monitor improvements and identify sustainable solutions on the individual practice level, local community level, nationally, and worldwide. National breastfeeding data is now tracked in the Center for Disease Control's Early Childhood Nutrition and Breastfeeding Report. This report combines breastfeeding data previously shared in the CDC Breastfeeding Report Cards with other indicators related to early childhood nutrition, such as early care and education centers (ECE) licensing standards for breastfeeding support. It also reports paid family and medical leave legislation by state. The 2025 report shares data from 2022 and shows that nationally:

• 85.1% of families initiate breastfeeding
• 27.9% exclusively breastfeeding through 6 months
• 40.8% breastfeeding at 12 months

Nationwide breastfeeding rates help establish public health goals like the Healthy People Initiative which sets objectives to improve the health of our nation. While breastfeeding initiation has increased and we surpassed the Healthy People 2020 goal for increasing breastfeeding initiation to 81.9%, it’s apparent that we need to better support efforts that improve the rate of exclusive breastfeeding at 6 months, and any breastfeeding at 12 months. The Healthy People 2030 objectives of increasing duration (at least 54.15% of infants breastfeeding through 12 months) and exclusivity (at least 42.4% of infants breastfed exclusively through their first six months) are in response to the data collected.

Tracking progress isn’t only important on a national level. In order to do our part to meet these goals, we need track our practices’ rates, too.

Knowing Breastfeeding Rates Help Primary Care Practices

For primary care practices, tracking breastfeeding rates helps monitor your individual quality improvement efforts and clarify where to focus sustainable next steps. It establishes your practice's needs and successes. (For more information about how to identify your practice's needs, read through our 6-point practice assessment up on the blog.)

If you have low breastfeeding initiation, your practice may focus efforts on prenatal education. If you have high initiation but a significant drop-off at 2 months, well visits and integrating lactation support at visits in the first month after hospital discharge will be critical. If a decrease happens after families return to work, then prioritizing mental health support, connecting with community initiatives, and supporting workplace breastfeeding-friendly practices may be needed. Plus, your individual rates help you benchmark your practice to the state and national breastfeeding rates.

Is Individually Collecting Breastfeeding Rates a Sustainable Solution?

While an individual practice can collect their own breastfeeding rates with creative solutions like manual chart review, adapting your electronic medical record, or enlisting a student to help, these solutions are time intensive and not sustainable. The World Breastfeeding Week’s campaign seeks to create sustainable breastfeeding support systems and highlight successes; each practice individually figuring out how to collect their own rates is not a practical or sustainable option.

We Need System-Wide Outpatient Breastfeeding Rates

We need to readily track breastfeeding rates to monitor progress at the local practice and community level, and we need the help of our electronic medical records to make this sustainable.  Reports like the 2025 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report on breastfeeding help bring attention to these needs.  This report includes recommendations to encourage and support breastfeeding, such as a recommendation for The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare to “develop and implement a Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) performance measure of breastfeeding.”  System wide changes like a HEDIS performance measure will help prioritize change within our health care systems and EMRs to support breastfeeding.

Call on Your EMR to Make Changes

Here’s a call to action: Submit a request to your EMR this month to include tracking breastfeeding initiation and on-going rates at well child visits through the first 2 years, consistent with WHO and AAP recommendations. This request by users will establish a need and interest, and help EMRs prioritize the change. With this small action, each of us can help build & track sustainable support for breastfeeding within our practices.

Primary Care Breastfeeding Support Works

We know primary care support of breastfeeding improves breastfeeding outcomes.  We know integrating this support in the early postpartum at primary care visits helps families succeed.  We need to strengthen the success of this model, and routinely tracking breastfeeding rates is one step in the process.

But it shouldn’t only be the responsibility of individual practices to take the initiative. We need system-wide changes that prioritize breastfeeding, and what better time to advocate for these changes than during National Breastfeeding Month!