Hello everyone,

It is my absolute pleasure to introduce myself to you all in this month’s edition of the Health Professional Newsletter.

I commenced my role as Professional Engagement Lead in late November with ABA. This is a new role for the organisation and one in which I will be, broadly speaking, connecting ABA’s work with Australia’s health professionals. This is such a wonderful opportunity to showcase the high-quality materials that ABA produces to educate and support health professionals as they support breastfeeding women.

A little about myself.

I trained as a nurse and then as a midwife at La Trobe University in the 1990’s (eek – last century!) and worked as a graduate midwife at the then Sunshine Hospital in Melbourne before a stint in rural South Australia where we moved when my daughter was just three months old. Connecting to the local ABA group in the Riverland was incredibly important for me at this time, being new to the region and a mum with a small baby. I drove 60 km to my first local ABA meeting and I never looked back.

On our return to Melbourne and the birth of baby number two, I engaged with our local ABA group in Brunswick and then trained as a breastfeeding counsellor and also returned to paid work at The Royal Women’s. I became an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant in 2008 and continued to work as a midwife and to volunteer with ABA. When I began studying a Master’s degree part-time I stepped away from my ABA work mainly due to a lack of spare time, although it was a big wrench to leave. A PhD about breastfeeding followed this – my research was a focused ethnographic study of lactation consultant practice. I went to work at Australian Catholic University in the Bachelor of Midwifery program in 2018 and I was active in initiating an affiliation agreement between ABA and ACU. This meant that ABA was actively promoted in the course and ABA members were also involved in teaching midwifery students.

When the role of Professional Engagement lead at ABA was advertised, I felt like it could be a good fit for me. You will have noted the strong intertwining of peer support and health professional work in my story so far. At a national level, strong connections between health professionals and peer supporters are arguably a key factor in ensuring that women and families get the support they need to start, and continue to, breastfeed.

I look forward to meeting many of you in 2024.

Dr Jennifer Hocking

Professional Engagement Lead

Growth & Engagement Team