Our local hospital’s maternity ward has had several incidents where babies rolled out of the mother’s hospital bed or the partner’s recliner chair onto the floor when the parent fell asleep (fortunately with no serious injuries). Babies usually sleep in a clear plastic cot/bassinet next to mother’s bed.
They have drafted a “Safety Notice” to go above each cot/bassinet, which requires parents to place the baby back into the bassinet as soon as they feel sleepy, and includes the phrase that once you relax and fall asleep, "your baby will probably roll off you and onto the floor”

Our local maternity service users/ patients group and local antenatal/ birth teachers found this language to be scaremongering and undermining for new parents on their first night.  We support informing the parents about safe sleep practices (and we do not consider the recliner to be a safe place for a parent to sleep with a baby!), but we feel that this language will imprint on vulnerable new parents that they themselves are likely to harm their babies, before they even manage to go home to their own beds!

The hospital did briefly invest in attachable side-cots, as in Helen Ball’s Sleep Lab research here in the UK, but unfortunately they do not fit the new electric beds and are now in storage.

Do any of you have such notices in more nurturing language? And which might encourage families to continue to meet their baby’s needs at night once they go home...
(we do need to keep the text very simple and to a minimum as not all our families read English)

Many thanks


Helen Gray IBCLC
London
UK
 
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