Changing the Culture of Infant Care through Collaboration: A Conference to Connect Clinics, Hospitals and Community Partners

Project Summary Sleep-related deaths, such as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), are the leading cause of death for infants over 28 days and claim 3,500 lives each year in the United States. Evidence- based guidelines have been provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) since the early 1990's. Despite this, many parents have never been counseled by healthcare

professionals on these risk-reduction strategies and continue to make unsafe choices for their infant's sleep position, location and environment. As such, there is an urgent need to enhance dissemination of the AAP Safe Sleep Recommendations to healthcare professionals. Since, 2015, annual conferences have been held in Kansas to certify Safe Sleep Instructors (SSIs).

The goal of the SSI training conferences has been to build a statewide infrastructure of safe sleep champions to enhance the capacity of healthcare professionals to provide consistent and complete safe sleep education to caregivers. Historically, SSIs have been nurses, home visitors, health department staff, and others interested in reducing infant death. The overall purpose of

this dissemination and implementation conference application is to expand the dissemination of evidence-based information and tools to enhance the capacity of communities to increase quality of care and access to care in order to reduce infant mortality. This will be accomplished by training SSIs who will return to their communities as Safe Sleep champions where they will

disseminate tools and best practices from the conference to healthcare professionals. We aim to improve the current training model by developing standardized, evidence-informed curriculum materials reflecting a national focus instead of Kansas-specific information; host a series of SSI training conferences where evidence-based information and tools are provided; expand

conference attendance to states beyond Kanas; and offer bimonthly webinars to support all certified SSIs. To determine effectiveness, all trainings and outcomes will be evaluated using the RE-AIM framework. Conference attendees (SSIs in training) will complete a pre- and post- training knowledge assessment as well as a post-training satisfaction survey. To assess

dissemination of conference materials following the training, certified SSIs will collect pre- and post-data from all professionals they train and all participants of Safe Sleep Community Baby Showers or Crib Clinics. For SSIs providing hospital and outpatient certification, documentation is also collected and evaluated.