Helping to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome among disadvantaged families
Health Innovation South West has supported national charity The Lullaby Trust to develop and evaluate a new safer sleep resource to help care professionals hold supportive conversations with disadvantaged families at risk of being affected by sudden infant death.
Each year, more than 500 babies die suddenly and unexpectedly, and over half of these deaths remain unexplained.* This is often referred to as sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Although SIDS is rare (0.24 deaths per 1,000 live births**) and the cause is not known, there are factors that are known to increase the risk, such as sleeping arrangements and deprivation.
The Lullaby Trust funds research into SIDS, raises awareness and promotes safer baby sleep, as well as providing specialist support for bereaved families. As part of Health Innovation South West’s Perinatal Health Equity Programme, we supported The Lullaby Trust to develop and pilot a new safer sleep resource in the form of a poster. This was designed to help practitioners and families to understand and identify modifiable SIDS risks specifically associated with disadvantaged home environments.
Our evaluation of the pilot shows that use of The Lullaby Trust resource has the potential to reduce risk of SIDs in the sleep practices of families – both in the South West and beyond.
Implementing the resource
We offered advice on the language and layout of the resource before supporting implementation across the region to gather feedback from both practitioners and families.
Through our involvement in previous perinatal health equity stakeholder sessions, we were able to identify eight sites in Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, and Dorset that agreed to implement the resource and provide feedback. These included post-natal wards, perinatal mental health services, community midwifery, health visiting, family nurse partnership and voluntary sector organisations. Between May 2022 and February 2023, practitioners at these sites were encouraged to fit the resource into their safer sleep conversations with families in a way that worked for them. Many of these practitioners were familiar with and already using existing materials from The Lullaby Trust in their conversations with parents but recognised that the images in these resources often didn’t match the reality of the families they supported.
The resource was used in different ways by different practitioners. Some used it during one-to-one conversations with families, explaining the risks shown in the poster or asking the family member to spot the risks and then discussing their responses. Others used it in a group dynamic with multiple families at once.
Evaluating the resource
To understand how likely practitioners were to use the resource on an ongoing basis, we carried out a survey and interviews during our evaluation to assess how confident practitioners felt in using it.
Our findings indicate that use of The Lullaby Trust resource, alongside well-informed practitioner guidance about safer sleep, is likely to reduce risk in the sleep practices of some families.
All the practitioners surveyed reported understanding the resource and how to use it. They also all said they felt comfortable raising the issue of safer sleeping with parents and families and having a supportive conversation about safer sleep using the resource. All practitioners agreed that the resource fitted well into the support pathway for their service users and that it had improved the quality and frequency of conversations they were having about safer sleep. Some also commented on specific circumstances when the visual nature of the resource had been useful in facilitating a better conversation around safer sleep, such as with non-native English speakers and parents with learning disabilities.
The resource was also well received by parents regardless of the setting in which it was used. Those surveyed reported feeling clear about the purpose of the conversation and what the key messages were. Many also said that the use of a picture had helped them to understand the issues of safer sleep. Some suggestions for possible improvement were also gathered, such as making the poster bigger or less crowded and producing a complementary resource to show the ideal infant sleep environment.
We have also helped to introduce the resource to additional partner organisations, such as housing charities that may not have previously been involved in similar perinatal support projects.
Next steps
While national rollout of the resource could be a possibility, it would require adequate promotion and guidance to ensure the resource reaches the practitioners and families who would be most likely to benefit from it. Nonetheless, there is the potential that the resource could have a wider reaching positive impact for families beyond the South West.
Our evaluation report is available here. For more information or if you have questions, please contact Health Innovation South West Evaluation Lead, Lou Hall ([email protected]).
Health Innovation South West is supporting its partners to evaluate impact and apply evidence and learning to improve the delivery of a wide range of services. Learn more here.
Our Perinatal Health Equity Programme ran from April 2021 to June 2023. Find out more about its impact on our webpage.
Further information on the work of The Lullaby Trust is here.
Sources
* Our life-saving safer sleep advice – The Lullaby Trust
** ONS, Unexplained deaths in infancy, England and Wales: 2020
