Community Assessment and Diagnosis: Exclusive Breastfeeding Promotion in MontrealDepartment of Nursing, Athabasca UniversityNURS 434: Community Health Promotion

 Community health nursing focuses on promoting healthy lifestyles for individuals, families and groups within a particular community while also placing emphasis on illness prevention and monitoring. In order to achieve these objectives in community health nursing, proper assessment is needed to identify the needs and issues within the community. Assessment is a crucial role performed by community health nurses together with other members of the public health care (PHC) team. As mentioned by Vollman et al. (2017), the continuous process of community health assessment allows for the identification of strengths, gaps, and needs within the population and leads to determining the steps needed to bridge the gaps in PHC. This paper aims to perform a partial community assessment and diagnose a need for health promotion related to breastfeeding within the Montreal community in Quebec. Three determinants of health are identified from the Population Health Promotion assessment model used in the assessment and research process. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a community diagnosis in relation to breastfeeding promotion in Montreal.Importance of the Breastfeeding Health AssessmentThe researcher chose this community because of two friends who gave birth within the last sixmonths and expressed little to no breastfeeding support once they were discharged from the hospitals in Montreal. Both have stopped EBF prior to six months postpartum. Breastfeeding is widely known for playing a vital role in an infant’s development as well as lowering the risks of disease and increasing wellbeing for mothers. Health Canada, in accordance with World Health Organization’s breastfeeding recommendations, advocates exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) for the first six months of life (Francis et al., 2021). However, breastfeeding rates in Quebec decrease significantly before the first six months postpartum is reached (Agnolon et al., 2020). Assessing the factors affecting mothers in Montreal to continue or stop EBF up to the first six months postpartum can assist in improving