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Community Practitioner's Amy Brewerton spent a day in York with Lynn Fitzharris to find out what a typical working day entails
PULLING INTO YORK STATION AT 9AM on a gloomy Tuesday morning, I was a little nervous and apprehensive about my first day shadowing a jobbing health visitor. Despite reading extensively about the health visitor role through my work for Community Practitioner and speaking to numerous experienced professionals on the phone and at CPHVA events, I'd never encountered a health visitor in their natural habitat and was curious to find out more.
I was met from the station with a hug from Lynn Fitzharris, the charming and cheerful breastfeeding lead at Clifton Children's Centre in York, who would be showing me the ropes for the day. Central to Lynn's role is to build community capacity in York to promote and sustain breastfeeding across the city, and she is enthusiastic about the ways in which she plans to help York achieve UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative (BFI) status by 2020.
In her car on the way to our first stop, she explained how her team had set up and run Nurture, a breastfeeding support group that meets twice a week at two different high-need locations in the city. The sessions give mums an opportunity to meet and share experiences, and are run by a rota of health visitors with the help of breastfeeding counsellors and peer supporters. Lynn explained that the morning's session would quite busy, as she was going to be doing some breastfeeding...