Safe Sleeping of Infants

The South Australian Safe Infant Sleeping Standards are a comprehensive set of standards for placing infants less than 12 months old to sleep. These standards were developed to help reduce the occurrence of sudden unexpected deaths of infants during sleep. Several factors occur frequently in the circumstances of these deaths. These factors are not causes of death in their own right.  Rather, they increase the risk of infants dying after being placed to sleep. The Standards provide a consistent suite of messages that health professionals can use to guide the decisions families make about safe infant sleeping.

Through the careful work of South Australia police, a great deal of information about the circumstances of sudden unexpected infant deaths is recorded that can help prevent these deaths from happening. Between 2005 and 2016 in South Australia, there were 128 cases where an infant died after being placed to sleep, where no apparent cause could be found for the death. The Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committee has analysed data about the factors that occurred in the circumstances of these deaths. The interactive visualisation allows you to investigate these factors and see how they co-occur. Some important intersections include:

1. The infant not being placed to sleep in an approved bed is the factor that most frequently occurs together with a number of other factors.
2. In more than half the cases in which the factor was breast-feeding, a parent also smoked.

These data have driven the recommendations by the Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committee in 2006 and 2016 that all families be provided with an approved bed for their infant to sleep in, along with information about safe infant sleeping. This is particularly true for families living in the most disadvantaged areas of South Australia. As shown in the Committee’s last quarterly blog post, sudden unexpected infant deaths occur more frequently in the State’s most disadvantaged areas.