With a passion for guiding families through the early days of feeding, Deirdre Heffernon started The Lactation Nurse to provide compassionate, calm reassurance and evidence-based care to parents. As a mother of two daughters, she knows first-hand how rewarding breastfeeding can be – and how overwhelming and difficult it can feel without the right support. After spending 17 years as an A&E nurse, she discovered a new calling when her own breastfeeding journey led her to a local support group that changed everything. That experience ignited a desire to help other parents feel confident, informed and empowered. Today, she brings together her clinical background, her lived experience and her warm, down-to-earth approach to offer personalised infant feeding support to families across her community, with the belief that every family deserves to reach their feeding goals.
The passion: What inspired you to set up your business?
My background is emergency nursing. I was an A&E nurse for 17 years and really enjoyed the role, made some of the best friends, and it’s also the place I met my husband! But it can be a very difficult place to work and I decided long ago that this wasn’t sustainable long term, especially when we decided to have a family. Working 12 hour shifts, nights, weekends and Christmases definitely became EVEN LESS appealing when I had my first baby in 2016. We were so thrilled and in love, but breastfeeding was really difficult. I attended the local Breastfeeding Support Group and they turned it all around and helped me so much. Excellent support and reassurance from them allowed me to meet my feeding goals, so I decided to train with them as a breastfeeding peer support volunteer. I volunteered for almost 8 years and in that time I learnt so much, met some incredible and inspiring women and really really enjoyed educating and supporting new parents. I decided in 2023 to retrain as a lactation consultant so did a specialised course and then, in 2024, left A&E after 17 years, took a massive pay cut and started a support worker role in an infant feeding team. It was really frightening leaving the security of my senior nurse salary but it has been such a wonderful experience. I have learnt so much, I have met some amazing women and I’m part of an incredible team. I continue to work part time in this role and I passed the IBCLC Lactation Consultant exam in July this year. I decided to set up the business immediately after I passed. Private practice really works around working part time and having a family and it has been really wonderful to be able to so closely support families. It’s really lovely to have regular follow-ups and it’s the most satisfying job to help people meet their feeling goals.
The launch: How did you start out in the beginning?
After I sat my lactation consultant exam it was a long three-month wait to get my results. It was HARD and I was really worried about failing, but I risked it and decided to spend some time and money on my logo and website, which I built myself. I looked around other local lactation consultants to see about pricing and services and I also did a lot of research about the practicalities of starting a business. I wanted to make sure that I did everything right, so I made sure I registered my business with HMRC immediately, was GDPR compliant and fully insured. I started my Instagram page and published my website the day I passed my exam! I registered with the Lactation Consultants of Great Britain, which offers insurance and education benefits to members, but also has a search function where parents can find an IBCLC lactation consultant near their postcode. I started to promote myself with some online parenting directories so I could easily be found and have been focusing on my search engine optimisation so that I appear on Google searches. I also have a small advert in the Natural Parent Magazine, which is very exciting! I got my first inquiry within a week, which was such a thrill!
The innovation: What was the biggest breakthrough for you with your business?
It is still early days for my business. I have been working in private practice now for three months, but in the last month, I’ve seen a significant increase in my enquiries and bookings and I feel like most families find me through word-of-mouth rather than Google searches now. This is a really satisfying and gratifying way to be contacted because it means the people that I’ve supported previously have really valued my work. There was one particular family who I supported a couple of times. They did antenatal classes and recommended me on their class WhatsApp. I’ve now seen three or four of those women from the same group and have had lovely feedback.
Yin and Yang: How do you balance work and family?
The whole reason I wanted to focus more on private practice was because of my family life. I want to be able to take my children to school and pick them up, and I can manage that now with home visits in between the school runs! That’s been the most positive family-friendly change I could’ve made. It is still tricky to fit everything in with this type of business – I am mostly doing home visits but then have to type up reports and feeding plans as well as follow-up support online. This can take up a lot of time, but it’s quite early days so I’m just trying to balance it all and set boundaries.
There is also a real compulsion to take on every single booking, especially when you’ve just started out, even if it’s in the evening or at the weekend. I did that in the beginning and I was left with absolutely no time with my children or time to myself, which defeated the whole purpose of starting private practice. I’d also like to be able to have time at home to do life admin, clean the house and maybe batch cook! So I needed to take a step back and look at how home and family life was being impacted by this and set some boundaries around how many appointments I offer a week.
