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Message Stick: Safe sleep education with Aboriginal families in SA – sharing knowledge in the community By Nina Sivertsen, Tahlia Johnson, Wilhelmine Lieberwirth, Anna Dowling, Sharon Watts and Julian Grant
Healthcare professionals are continually challenged by the need to provide health information that successfully changes health practices1. University nursing and midwifery tertiary education include preparing graduates to undertake patient and family education within their nursing role, and healthcare professionals provide safe sleep education to numerous families in their daily clinical practice. This is an important part of person and family centred care.2 Yet how mainstream health personnel connect with Aboriginal families in their care around this important issue is unclear. Nurses often provide
this support, but how nurses facilitate each patient’s and their family’s learning seems invisible in the nursing literature2. Important to note is that the health system currently provides no safe sleep space alternative for Aboriginal families that recognise cultural practices of co-sleeping and closeness to baby3. This is a story about safe sleep education and how to translate safe sleep messages into the community. The story is part of the Safely Sleeping Aboriginal Babies in SA – Doing it Together, where families enrolled in a safe sleep program that provides Aboriginal families with safe sleep education and a Pepi-Pod®. This plastic box acts as a separate sleep space and surface and enables cosleeping. The families who found the PepiPod® and sleep education useful expressed that they want more families to know about safe sleep education. Families said they want to share the safe sleep education message with other families to keep Aboriginal babies safe while sleeping. Overall the project includes an education blitz around safe sleep messaging, counting 235 healthcare professionals. Of the 70 families enrolled who were eligible to participate, 44 families fully completed the program, as 26 families were unable to be contacted for follow up.
Aboriginal community researchers have been driving the Pepi-Pods® into the community. This included delivering the Pepi-Pod® and, importantly, the safe sleep education. Many of the 44 families mentioned the impact of the individual and personal safe sleep education session with the Aboriginal community researchers. Families found the education to be personalised and easy to understand and put into practice. As part of the safe sleep education, visual tools were used to help our research team communicate the importance of safely sleeping their babies. Within these tools includes a small plastic tube to signify an airway. A significant number of families who provided feedback on the education program all spoke about the tube and how it gave them a visual image of why a flat, safe space for babies to sleep is so important. Results from the education blitz for health professionals also identified that health professional knowledge was relatively low relating to what makes a baby’s head and airway at risk of SUDI. Focussing on the air tube may offer a way forward for safe sleep messaging. Many participants commented in followup interviews that they felt confident passing their pods on to other family and friends having a baby and making sure to
Community researchers working with the Pepi-Pod® program Sharon Watts and Anna Dowling (pictured), Wilhelmine Lieberwirth and Tahlia Johnson (not in picture). Photo by Nina Sivertsen
42 Jan–Mar 2022 Volume 27, No. 6