For NDC Accredited Practitioners
Not Accredited yet? Learn more here
The NDC Lactation Fellowship is the capstone of the Neuroprotective Developmental Care (NDC or Possums) pathway, new in 2026. It has been many years in the making, offering comprehensive and advanced knowledge and clinical skills within the field of breastfeeding and lactation medicine, which integrates with advanced knowledge and clinical skills within the other interrelated NDC domains of sleep, cry-fuss problems, and perinatal mental health.
Who it is for
The Lactation Fellowship is for NDC Accredited Practitioners who wish to apply clinical translations of the very latest breastfeeding medicine research in their consultations, to develop skills of critical analysis, and to consider breastfeeding medicine in the broader contexts of history, society, ideology, and health systems. The Fellowship also teaches critical analysis of research methodology and the theoretical models underlying the field.
On completion
On completion, you are able to use the title NDC Lactation Fellow. It includes a separate stream for medical practitioners.
Prerequisites: Active Maintenance of NDC Accreditation membership
NDC Accredited Practitioners enrolled in Maintenance can join the Fellowship from their Education Hub dashboard. If you are not yet NDC Accredited, the Fellowship is the fourth step of the NDC pathway, and the pathway begins with the two NDC Masterclasses.
Join the FellowshipDr Douglas has made a contribution second to none in Australian general practice in exploring effective strategies by which primary health care providers might support distraught parents of our youngest citizens troubled by early feeding and sleep difficulties… I am in awe.
The Fellowship contains 29 modules in four parts. It is built by Dr Pamela Douglas, who is also currently the lead educator. More information on each part, module, guest contributors and learning outcomes can be found below.
The Fellowship rests on three principles, set out here so that a clinician considering it can examine them before joining. They are stated plainly because the Fellowship teaches participants to analyse how theoretical models, orthodoxy, power, status and rhetoric shape the kind of knowledge that gains institutional and policy support in breastfeeding medicine, and expects the same analysis to be applied to NDC's own published frames.
The Fellowship is a platform for advanced practitioners to discuss cases and issues, and it welcomes respectful and lively debate, disagreement and discussion. The Fellowship is built on the understanding that this practice best serves parents and their babies.
From the perspective of evolutionary biology, breastfeeding is the infant's evolutionary biological expectation.
Supplementary feeds (donor milk, commercial milk formula) are secondary evolutionary and sociocultural adaptations. Outcomes improve when evolutionary principles are applied to supplementary feeding practices.
Lactation education in the context of Neuroprotective Developmental Care includes all families regardless of infant feeding method.
Optimal infant development and breastfeeding outcomes require health professionals to develop advanced clinical skills in the domains of infant sleep, cry-fuss problems, infant development, and perinatal and infant mental health, because these domains interact with and co-evolve with breastfeeding and feeding practices.
From the perspective of complexity science, exclusion of high-level clinical and research expertise in these other infant care domains limits the efficacy of breastfeeding and lactation support, drives overdiagnosis and overtreatment, and may paradoxically worsen breastfeeding outcomes.
Lactation education in the context of Neuroprotective Developmental Care is inclusive of the latest research and clinical translations in the domains of infant development, unsettled infant behaviour, and perinatal and infant mental health.
NDC builds on transdisciplinary generalism to align with the Slow Medicine and Choosing Wisely movements in the delivery of genuinely holistic, patient and family-centred care.
NDC recognises that breastfeeding interventions must support the mental health and wellbeing of both mother and infant to optimise developmental outcomes. NDC challenges current trends to overdiagnosis and overtreatment in breastfeeding and lactation medicine. By applying implementation science, NDC has developed and clinically tested explicitly named and holistic interventions which can then be evaluated against other approaches. Ten university-led studies have evaluated NDC, nine of them published to date. NDC builds clinicians' capacity for skilful dissent and debate, critical analysis of research, and leadership, in order to protect and advance breastfeeding locally and internationally.
Lactation education in the context of Neuroprotective Developmental Care fosters dissent and critical thinking in order to protect both infant wellbeing and parent mental health.
The NDC Lactation Fellowship has been an amazing learning opportunity. The content is comprehensive and highly relevant - I’ve gone from having little knowledge about breastfeeding medicine (before starting with the NDC Institute) to being able to confidently help mothers and babies with a wide range of breastfeeding problems. I highly recommend the fellowship to any NDC practitioners who want to extend their skills in evidence-based lactation support.
NDC Accredited Practitioners with a current Maintenance membership. Stream 1 is open to registered health professionals, including IBCLCs who hold health professional registration; Stream 2 is for medical practitioners.
You will hold the title of NDC Lactation Fellow, which you may use publicly while your Maintenance membership is current.
The Fellowship requires a minimum of 95 hours across 29 modules, completed at your own pace over a period of up to five years. The prerequisite courses for the NDC Lactation Fellowship total at least 74 hours.
Stream 1, for registered health professionals, allows participants to select from the content according to their own scope of practice and interests. Stream 2 is for medical practitioners. Live Network Hours run both as mixed sessions and as separate stream sessions, so that each stream can discuss cases relevant to its own scope of practice.
No. The Fellowship is assessed by multiple-choice questions in each module, passed at 100% with a second attempt allowed, three case discussions at Live Network Hours, and three self-audits.
Dr Pamela Douglas MBBS FRACGP PhD IBCLC FABM is the lead educator across all 29 modules. She is a general practitioner and breastfeeding medicine physician who first qualified as an IBCLC in 1994, a Fellow of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Medicine at Griffith University, Senior Lecturer at The University of Queensland, and author of 30+ peer-reviewed research papers that form the foundation of Neuroprotective Developmental Care. Twenty invited researchers, clinicians and educators contribute across 22 of the 29 modules; they are listed beside each module in the curriculum above.
The curriculum handbook, including all 29 module titles, the teaching methods, assessment and cost, can be downloaded above.
