Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: What Healthcare Professionals and Parents Know About How to Prevent it in Portugal

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. Risk factors related to SIDS have been identified, and most of them concern the infant’s sleep position and environment. Objective: Our objective was to conduct a survey with parents and healthcare professionals at the Centro Hospitalar Universitário São João (CHUSJ), in order to assess their knowledge of SIDS and its risk factors. Materials and Methods: This study used two structured self-administered questionnaires aimed at evaluating the knowledge of parents and healthcare professionals about SIDS prevention. Results: Overall, 100% of healthcare professionals and 67.7% of parents were aware of SIDS. Besides, 82.3% of healthcare professionals and 47.5% of parents recognized the supine position as the safest 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 seven questions were correctly answered by the majority of respondents. Discussion and Conclusion: Healthcare professionals are not as well informed about SIDS as they should be and have little confidence in discussing SIDS-related issues. Therefore, this study highlights the paramount importance of ensuring that their training on this topic is up to date, especially due to their crucial role of (partial) gatekeepers of this information for parents, and that providing them with appropriate support could likely contribute to a substantial decrease in the number of SIDS cases.