Tower Hamlets – Using infant feeding to bring the framework to life
Tower Hamlets started from a simple but powerful observation: if you care about the first 1,001 days, you have to get infant feeding right. Their recently updated Early Help Strategy already recognises infant feeding as central to babies’ health, mothers’ wellbeing, and early relationships – but the work was scattered across services, and the data was patchy.
The Common Outcomes Framework domains – Safe, Healthy, Happy, Learning, Engaged - gave them a structure to pull this together and they used the detailed shared outcomes framework co-produced in London to locate infant feeding within a bigger story about early outcomes. Practically, they mapped infant feeding onto the first three priorities in the Tower Hamlets Early Help Outcomes Framework, all framed against the common outcomes:
Healthy: promoting early take-up of antenatal care, and extending the length of exclusive breastfeeding as a positive outcome (healthy mothers and babies), with an explicit ambition to make this a national indicator.
Happy / Safe: increasing early identification of perinatal mental health needs, recognising that emotional wellbeing and secure attachment in that 1,001-day window underpin safety and happiness later on.
Engaged: ensuring families can access culturally appropriate support through family hubs, health visitors and community partners.
Pulling the baby feeding service in-house and integrating it into the family hubs model shifted infant feeding from a standalone offer into a visible part of a whole-system Early Help response, within their Early Help Outcomes Framework. Health visitors now run over 60 sessions a week in hubs, and the infant feeding work sits clearly within a shared outcomes language rather than as “just another service”.
The Common Outcomes Framework and London shared outcomes framework has also changed how Tower Hamlets thinks about data. They still collect infant feeding data at three points (hospital discharge, 6–8 week check, 1-year check), but are now explicitly asking: how does this data help us track progress against the Healthy / Happy / Safe / Engaged outcomes, not just count activity? Their next steps -more integrated data collection, better collaboration with GPs, and using joined-up data to understand hospital admissions -are all anchored in the idea that strong, common outcomes-focused and aligned infant feeding support is a concrete way family hubs contribute to the wider outcomes system.