Health care facilities play a vital role in the establishment of breastfeeding. The Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding provide a supportive pathway enabling women to achieve their breastfeeding intentions and guiding the training of healthcare workers in breastfeeding support.

The Ten Steps were presented to the world in the 1989 as the WHO/UNICEF Joint Statement on the Protection, Promotion and Support of Breastfeeding: The special role of the Maternity Services. The Innocenti Declaration in 1990 called upon the world to fully implement the Ten Steps in all maternities by 1995.

Twenty years later, more than 152 countries have Baby-friendly hospitals. They have implemented the Ten Steps, and, with the addition of relevant parts of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes they have also helped to resist the promotion of commercial infant formula to health care practitioners and the public.

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Every facility providing maternity services and care for newborn infants should:

1. Have a written breastfeeding policy that is routinely communicated to all health care staff.
    
2. Train all health care staff in skills necessary to implement this policy.
    
3. Inform all pregnant women about the benefits and management of breastfeeding.
    
4. Help mothers initiate breastfeeding within a half-hour of birth.
    
5. Show mothers how to breastfeed and how to maintain lactation, even if they should be separated from their infants.
    
6. Give newborn infants no food or drink other than breast milk unless medically indicated.
    
7. Practice rooming-in - allow mothers and infants to remain together - 24 hours a day.
    
8. Encourage breastfeeding on demand.
    
9. Give no artificial teats or pacifiers (also called dummies or soothers) to breastfeeding infants.
    
10. Foster the establishment of breastfeeding support groups and refer mothers to them on discharge from the hospital or clinic.