Female hospital workers in Morocco: factors influencing breastfeeding duration with self-reported experiences

Abstract

Health workers (HW) could be at risk of early weaning because of working conditions. Our aim was to determine factors influencing the duration of breastfeeding among Moroccan hospital workers, and to explore their breastfeeding (BF) experiences. A cross-sectional study was conducted in four hospitals in Rabat/Morocco (from November 2015 to April 2016), including each woman working in the hospital, with at least one living child and who accepted to be interviewed. Data of 203 hospital workers were analyzed. The median age was 39. The median duration of any breastfeeding was 8 months. Among different categories of HW, physicians had the lowest duration of breastfeeding. Factors significantly correlated to longer duration of breastfeeding were infant rank (p = 0.003), early initiation of breastfeeding (p < 0.001), access to milk storage generally (p = 0.04), husband’s opinion on breastfeeding (p < 0.001) and category of hospital worker (p = 0.01). Three central themes emerged from the analysis of qualitative data: “Breastfeeding health worker has to assume her work duties as any other health worker”, “the expression of need for support”, and “the lack of knowledge on breastfeeding”. In light of these results, we believe that physicians are a high-risk group of premature complete weaning; many actions should be taken for all HW to enhance their knowledge and giving them support.

Acknowledgements

Big thanks to Syrine Hamada and Mahmoud Hamada for their appreciable linguistic help. We would like to thank all hospital workers for accepting to be interviewed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).