The Canterbury Breastfeeding Advocacy Service is super-excited to announce that Eastgate Shopping Centre has just been certified as being a Breastfeeding-Friendly Workplace.
Breastfeeding provides a number of well-evidenced health benefits both to breastfeeding women and to their babies. Women report that returning to the paid workforce is a common reason for breastfeeding journeys to end. The Breastfeeding-Friendly Workplace Initiative is a project managed by the Canterbury Breastfeeding Network to support employers to ensure that barriers to continued breastfeeding are removed from their work setting. Thus Eastgate Shopping Centre has written a policy and made some changes to ensure that staff are able to breastfeed in an appropriate environment or to express and store breastmilk in appropriate places, during their working day.
As a workplace with a large number of customers and tenanting a large number of other workplaces, Eastgate Shopping Centre has taken their breastfeeding support even further by ensuring that customers also feel welcome to breastfeed. Customers can breastfeed in any of the public spaces of the centre or can use the family room which has private cubicles with seating and also power sockets for breast pumps. Eastgate Shopping Centre has announced their breastfeeding-friendly status to each of their tenants and will support any of them to individually undertake the process of becoming Breastfeeding-Friendly Workplaces for their own staff should they choose to. The Loft (a purpose-built space that is home to a broad range of social and community services that is housed in the shopping centre) became Breastfeeding-Friendly certified earlier in the year.
Congratulations to Eastgate Shopping Centre for committing to remove barriers to whānau ora (family health).
