The School of Medical Sciences, University of Hyderabad (UoH), hosted an event to commemorate the World Breastfeeding Week celebrations on 6th August 2025, Wednesday. The theme for the year 2025 was “Prioritize Breastfeeding: Create Sustainable Support Systems”.
World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated every year in the first week of August, championed by WHO, UNICEF, Ministries of Health and civil society partners around the globe. It is a time to recognize breastfeeding as a powerful foundation for lifelong health, development, and equity. This is also to ensure that every mother has access to the support and information she needs to breastfeed as long as she wishes to do so – by investing in skilled breastfeeding counselling, enforcing the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes, and creating environments—at home, in healthcare, and at work—that support and empower women.
For the university stakeholder community, in line with the theme for this year being “Prioritize Breastfeeding: Create Sustainable Support Systems”, it was felt that lot of working mothers and potential mothers and caregivers including the employers, families and partners need to create support systems in both homes and workplaces to help mothers continue breastfeeding for as long as possible and they need information and awareness with respect to creating these systems.
In this connection, doctors from the Fernandez Foundation held a 90-minute interactive event to make aware to our university stakeholder community the importance and the support systems for breastfeeding mothers and the environmental benefits of breastfeeding. This outstanding session covered breastfeeding myths and facts, practical feeding techniques, live demonstrations of feeding positions, and practical guidance on using breast pumps and storing milk with models.
More than 80 participants that included faculty, scholars, students and staff of the university attended this event at the Sir C V Raman Auditorium. The most exciting part was the question-and-answer session on the practicalities and feasibility of the creation of these support systems which the Fernandez Foundation team gave very pointed and well evidenced and implemented practical and time-tested solutions.
Dr. Tejo Pratap Oleti, Dr. Jaishree Kulkarni, Dr. Apoorva T, Dr. Sai Kiran, Dr. Sunita Swaroop and Ms. Maria from the foundation provided this very important overview from Fernandez Foundation side.
The Dean, School of Medical Sciences, Prof. Ramesh K Mishra lauded the organisation of this event and related it to the importance of breastfeeding and its immense role in cognitive growth and development. Prof. B R Shamanna, Professor at the School of Medical Sciences with his scholars and office staff organised this enlightening interaction.
Photos credit: Jirra Karthik, Ph.D scholar