Methods: Maternity Care Practices
Maternity Practices in Infant Nutrition and Care (mPINC) Survey
An electronic version of each hospital’s report was sent to the e-mail of the survey recipient in August 2021. If you are unable to locate your hospital’s mPINC report, please e-mail mpinc@cdc.gov with your request and include the hospital name and address. We also invite you to sign up for our CDC-mPINC-UPDATE listserv where we send out periodic updates about CDC’s mPINC survey.
Methods
In 2007, CDC administered the first Maternity Practices in Infant Nutrition and Care (mPINC) survey to every facility in the United States and territories that routinely provided maternity care services.
The initial survey established measures of practices and policies related to breastfeeding that are implemented at hospitals providing maternity care. CDC administered the survey every other year from 2007 to 2015 to monitor and examine changes in practices over time. After the 2015 administration, CDC redesigned the survey to reflect changes in maternity care practices that had occurred over the past decade. The redesigned survey launched in 2018.
Each survey year we screen hospitals by telephone. We contact the mother-baby nurse manager or the manager of the labor and delivery unit to help identify the best person to complete a survey that includes questions about infant nutrition, such as breastfeeding, using formula to feed healthy newborns, and feeding routines. Because we follow this process each time that we administer a new survey, the person identified to receive the survey one year is not necessarily the person identified to receive the survey in a later cycle.
It is extremely important for the validity of the survey that we follow the same protocol to identify survey recipients at each hospital as described above.
See what was asked on the 2020 mPINC survey. For more information about the mPINC survey, visit our Hospital FAQs webpage. If you have additional questions, email them to mPINC@cdc.gov.
