MDHHS, police train on infant sleep safety

By RICHARD JENKINS

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Bessemer - Members of the Gogebic County Sheriff's Department, Michigan State Police and Ironwood Public Safety Department - along with staff members of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services - learned the best ways to prevent infants from dying in their sleep Wednesday during a safe-sleep training session.

The thought behind the training was, because officers may be in homes more frequently than DHS employees, while responding to 911 calls, providing them with the tools to educate parents on infant safety while in homes on other business is a proactive way to help children.

"Our law enforcement, our first responders, our EMS departments - they're in the homes so much more than our staff are sometimes," said Kimberly Pickett, an infant safe-sleep consultant with the Michigan Public Health Institute, who ran the training. "They see some of these environments (where infants sleep), so it's their opportunity to say to our families, "Can I see your environment?' and then approaching it as, 'Let's take (these unnecessary items) out and let me show you how safe it can be.'"

Daniel Borth, a DHS services program manager for the county, said the addition of the law enforcement officers to the training began during a previous training on investigating child deaths.

"Law enforcement got to the end of (the previous training), and they said, 'How do we learn more about safe sleep? How do we learn more about what a safe sleep environment looks like,'' Borth said. "We already had this training set up ... so I just checked in (with Pickett) and said, 'Hey, can we involve our law enforcement in your training?'"

Borth said he is also one of the co-chairs of the county's child death review group and while he doesn't see a lot of child deaths, dying during sleep is one of the primary causes in cases they've seen.

"I think things that we find in common (in cases) are drugs and unsafe sleep environments," Borth said. "Illegal substances, unsafe sleep environments and uninformed parents. Those things are generally correlated with what we are finding."

Pickett's presentation discussed stressed how easy it was for infants to suffocate, pointing out that for really young infants it can be as simple as laying on their stomachs and being unable to lift their heads off the mattress after playing. She said because the cartilage in the nose isn't developed yet, and babies breath primarily through the nose, this can cut off their air supply if they are left unattended.

"You walk away from a baby that has zero control of the muscles in their arms or their necks, what's happening, they've been trying to lift themselves up and down now - even if it's for two or three minutes - and they are exhausted. Face down and they're done," Pickett said, telling the story of a baby who died down state after the baby was left alone on an adult bed while the mother grabbed a quick shower.

According to information in a handout distributed during the presentation, 712 infants died from sleep-related causes in Michigan between 2010 and 2014. In Michigan, 65 percent of infants found unresponsive aren't on their backs and 75 percent of sleep-related deaths occur in unsafe sleep locations.

Pickett said the rules for where it was okay for babies to sleep boils down to three basic things - having them sleep alone, on their backs, in a crib.

Pickett stressed that alone didn't just mean they need their own bed, but that anything other than a crib meeting current government requirements and a tightly fitted sheet posed a danger to an infant.

"Some people don't realize alone literally means alone - no stuffed animals, no bumper pads, no pillows," she said. "If it doesn't have a firm mattress with a tight-fitting sheet over it, it's not a proper sleep environment."

Pickett acknowledged many of the current standards for infant safety weren't done in the past, leading people to think that because they did something with older kids, or their parents did something and they turned out fine, the newer practices didn't need to be followed.

"Really we need to change our way of thinking on what it used to be versus what it is. Because today, things are done a lot differently," Pickett said.

She used the example of seat belts in cars as an example of changing attitudes to increase safety.

"Change is difficult, not changing can be fatal," she said.

The members of the law enforcement departments seemed to find the training informative.

"Everybody wants to make sure their little ones are safe. That's the number one priority, regardless of their circumstances, they all want to make sure their little ones are safe," said Michigan State Police Community Service Trooper Jerry Mazurek, who was one of the 12 law enforcement officers attending the training. "And this kind of another avenue (to do that). We make sure we put our kids in helmets on our bicycles, we make sure we put them in child safety seats, we make sure they wear their safety belts.

"Well, in their sleep environments, for our littlest and most vulnerable - where they can't cry out necessarily, or they can't rollover and get away from a situation where a larger child can - these are some things that we can do to help keep them safe."

For more information on making sure infants are sleeping safely, visit michigan.gov/safesleep.