Reduce SUDI and improve maternal and child health through smart Digital Technology

Dr McIntosh and her research team have developed the Safe Sleep Calculator which calculates SUDI risk for individual infants and predicts that 80 % of SUDI deaths occur in the 21% of babies who have a higher risk score (>1 per 3000 risk). The Safe Sleep Calculator is integrated into a web-tool called Survive and Thrive 2025, which assesses individualised SUDI protection needs and enables electronic communication and integration between community providers who support families to lower risk. This tool alone would not be sufficient to achieve the ministry target, but it is designed to reduce inequities in SUDI mortality by concentrating resources to those who most need it. It is currently in use and rolling out thought Counties Manukau Health DHB. Thus, Survive and Thrive is an important step to achieve reduced inequity with a new lower baseline risk of SUDI, on which we will build to refine and target smaller risks.

The Best Start Kōwae

From the expertise gained from developing Survive and Thrive 2025, the team have been able to develop the Best Start Kōwae (meaning modules) tools. The Best Start Kōwae are a set of web-tools which support Primary Care early pregnancy assessment, a second trimester immunisation visit and the maternal and infant 6-week postnatal check. I have led the clinical development of these tools, including all of the decision support development. We have collaborated widely with national experts to build the tools and the project has been boosted by the National Hāuora Collation Gen 2040 project, which will implement these tools nationally with one-year equity project funding from Ministry of Health.

The Best Start Kōwae contains comprehensive built-in decision support from New Zealand and international guidelines and recommendations. The 6-week infant check will include the Safe Sleep Calculator. These tools are integrated in the Practice Management Systems in Primary Care and are accessible to GP’s nurses and midwives to use for every woman and baby.