Most leading U.S. medical schools provide lactation support for employees
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Key takeaways:
- All medical schools had a clear list of lactation rooms and clearly posted institutional lactation policies.
- Only 8% of schools provided financial incentives to make up for clinical time lost while lactating.
Most institutions at leading U.S. medical centers had lactation-support policies in place, according to a research letter published in JAMA Network Open.
However, considerable opportunities remain to provide structural support for lactating employees, researchers concluded.
Workplace accommodations
“Addressing the needs of lactating physicians is essential to ensure that they continue to thrive and contribute to the medical profession and those we serve,” Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, FASCO, FASTRO, Lawrence W. Davis professor, chair of the department of radiation oncology at Emory University School of Medicine, and member of the Women in Oncology Peer Perspective Board, told Healio. “Given that medical professional bodies, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, emphasize the benefits of breastfeeding, the academic health care systems that employ and train physicians should be exemplars of workplace accommodation for other employers to emulate.”
Jagsi and colleagues sought to examine whether the top 50 U.S. schools of medicine per 2022 U.S. News and World Report rankings had institutional lactation-support policies on publicly accessible websites.
They also systematically evaluated policies for specific factors, including dedicated space or pumping equipment, accommodations and resources. Researchers obtained institution-level policies from each institution’s public website and conducted descriptive statistics in Microsoft Excel to analyze results. They collected all data between May and August 2022.
Accessibility
Most schools of medicine (94%) had publicly available website information, and all schools (100%) had a clear list of lactation rooms and clearly posted institutional lactation policies.
Moreover, 70% of schools had employee-only lactation rooms and 50% provided breast pumps.
Although only 8% of schools provided financial incentives to make up for clinical time lost while lactating, 50% of schools provided toolkits for supervisors to support lactating employees returning from leave, 58% provided outpatient lactation consultant support and 43% provided peer support.
Jagsi and colleagues additionally found that 82% of schools provided easily accessible contacts to address any issues with lactation facilities and 70% linked to websites about troubleshooting common lactation challenges.
Researchers acknowledged study limitations, including that the study was limited to the top 50 U.S. schools of medicine, which limits generalizability since less-resourced allopathic and osteopathic schools may have fewer resources for policy development and implementation. Additionally, they said the use of data from websites makes it difficult to know whether a school chose to publicize generalizability information.
‘Reassuring’ findings
“It was reassuring to see that all 50 institutions at leading medical centers had lactation-support policies,” Jagsi told Healio.
“We hope this will motivate further action to invest in structural support, such as dedicated space and equipment; accommodations, such as resources for supervisors and clearly posted policies; and resources for professional and peer support,” she said. “Future research is needed to evaluate the impact of various interventions to support lactating physicians and other workers in order to guide best practice.”
For more information:
Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, FASCO, FASTRO, can be reached on X (formerly known as Twitter): @reshmajagsi.
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Santhosh L, et al. JAMA Netw Open. 2023;doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.40048.
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