Recommended Lactation Consultant/Educator class?

[exactlywatt]

Hi,

I am an RN and interested in getting a Lactation Consultant or Educator cert. I am looking at several online "classes" and am curious if anyone has any experience with them or recommendations. Personally, I am pretty pro-breastfeeding and have BF all 3 of my kids for about 2 years each (baby just turned 1). I recognize however, what works for me is not for every woman and want to steer clear of classes heavy on ideology.

I'll be going back to work this fall, hopefully OB or post partum, and would like to eventually sit for the ILBLC exam at some point down the road.

Thanks!

[klone, MSN, RN]

You don't even have to be a nurse to be an IBCLC. It just makes you more employable in most settings.

[Nurse2b7337]

So how do you go about be coming certified? I would like work in the hospital. Thanks for the information.

[klone, MSN, RN]

If you want to work in a hospital setting, you will most likely need to have a nursing degree as well (although not necessarily an RN, let alone a BSN, as a good friend of mine is a very successful IBCLC at a very competitive Denver hospital and she has her LPN).

Here is the link to how to qualify to become an IBCLC: http://americas.iblce.org/steps-for-becoming-an-ibclc

In a nutshell, if you have a nursing degree, you need 90 hours of lactation-specific education (which is easy to obtain through various online classes and modules) and 1000 hours of clinical lactation consultancy hours (and consider yourself lucky, when I took the exam they required 3500 hours and it took me 8 years to get them). This will qualify you to take the exam, which is only offered once per year, every July.

[Nurse2b7337]

That was very informative and I thank you for the information!