Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: What healthcare professionals and parents know about how to prevent it

• Autor(a) principal: Sara Catarina Fernandes
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/128840
• topic: Ciências médicas e da saúde; Medical and Health sciences

Background: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is defined as the death of an infant of less than 1 year that is unexpected and unexplained after an extensive investigation including necropsy. In developed countries, SIDS is the first cause of mortality in the first year of life, excluding the neonatal period (first 28 days), and is the third leading cause of infant death in the world. Risk factors related to SIDS have already been identified, most of them related with the infant's sleep position and environment. The Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome of the American Academy of Pediatrics published in 2016 an update on the Recommendations for a Safe Infant Sleeping Environment in order to reduce the risk of all sleep-related infant deaths. Objective: This study aims at assessing the knowledge about SIDS risk factors of parents of infants born in the Centro Hospitalar Universitário São João (CHUSJ) and of healthcare professionals taking care of newborns in the same hospital. Materials and Methods: This study used two structured self-administered questionnaires aiming at evaluating the knowledge of parents and healthcare professionals about SIDS prevention and its risk factors. A statistical analysis of the responses was performed using STATA. Results: Overall, 67.7% of parents and 100% of healthcare professionals knew what SIDS stands for. Besides, 82.3% of healthcare professionals and 47.5% of parents recognized the supine position as the safest sleep position to prevent SIDS. For each of the 13 questions in the questionnaire about SIDS risk factors, the majority of healthcare professionals identified the correct answer whereas among parents only 7 questions were correctly answered by the majority of respondents. Only 37.2% of healthcare professionals and 8.7% of parents responded correctly to 75% or more of the 13 questions about SIDS risk factors. Healthcare professionals with children aged 5 or less are more likely to have stronger knowledge about SIDS risk factors than the other respondents (p = 0.032) and doctors are more likely than nurses to have less correct knowledge about SIDS risk factors (p = 0.028 and 0.012, respectively). Discussion and Conclusion: Healthcare professionals are not as well informed about SIDS as they should and, possibly due to their self-awareness of this, they have little confidence in discussing SIDS-related issues. This highlights how crucial the training of healthcare professionals about this topic is, and that their role of (partial) gatekeepers of this information for parents should be strengthened with appropriate support. By aligning their knowledge and behaviour with the latest SIDS prevention policies, they could effectively pass on to parents the correct messages, and consequently contribute to decrease the number of SIDS cases.