Funded Projects

Immigrant and Refugee Safe Sleep Resources

Project Year

2024

City & State

Atlanta, Georgia

Program Name

CATCH Resident

Topic

Immigrant/Migrant/Refugee/Undocumented

Program Description

The problem: Every year in the United States, 3500 previously healthy infants die from sudden unexpected infant death (SUID) or other sleep-related causes. Georgia loses 3 infants a week to sleep related causes and it is the leading cause of infant death for healthy infants. These deaths are preventable through evidence-based safe sleep practices [4]. For families and mothers that have just given birth, it is imperative that health care providers provide safe sleep resources and education as a part of anticipatory guidance. Previous studies have shown that children of immigrants face unique challenges in health care every day, such as barriers to transportation, access to medicine, and language barriers in utilizing health services [1]. To our knowledge, existing safe sleep resources are only available in English and Spanish excluding many Georgia families linguistically. There are also known cultural barriers to providing safe sleep education even without language barriers. For example, a group of African American mothers in Atlanta expressed that the safe sleep ABC messaging (adopted from Department of Health and Environmental Control) [11] : “Alone, Back to Sleep in Crib” is not always received well, because families perceive “Alone” as the baby being lonely. Limited studies exist describing additional safe sleep cultural barriers in immigrant communities. Thus there is a need to better understand the safe sleep education needs for other language speakers and to co-develop better resources for these communities.  Primary setting: Our primary settings are inpatient mother-baby units at two area birth hospitals, pediatric units in metropolitan Atlanta hospitals, and outpatient pediatric clinics. While this project is focused primarily on Atlanta initially, we plan to house the resources online as open access resources that could be used in other GA regions, and even beyond GA.     Number of children affected: This project will impact the families of 2,500+ newborns born at Grady Memorial Hospital a year and Emory Midtown Hospital with over 6000 annual births [8]. In addition, it will impact patients and families cared for within the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) system with over 1 million patient encounters a year. Atlanta is home to close to 900,000 immigrants, which is around 14% of the entire population [5]. Also, Atlanta has welcomed over 28,000 refugees since the 1970s who have a need for safe sleep resources [6].  Project goal: Assess the safe sleep education needs of Atlanta refugee families and co-design multimedia educational resources to be used by community and academic partners to ultimately empower families to implement safe sleep practices and save newborn lives.     The intervention: Initial intervention will involve community focus groups to better assess safe sleep education needs for Atlanta refugee communities. The primary intervention will be to co-develop alongside community members culturally contextualized safe sleep education resources in preferred languages. We anticipate the videos will be brief, describing safe sleep practices in communities’ preferred language and cultural context. Depending on the ability to share community resources, we hope to at least make videos in Amharic, Arabic and Swahili which are three common languages seen at Grady, Emory Midtown and CHOA. If community champions are available, we may do additional audio in Dari and French.   The anticipated outcome: We hope to improve access to safe sleep education for Georgia’s refugee communities whose preferred language is neither English nor Spanish. These resources will be open access and available for anyone to use online. We hope to have a final meeting with community members and collect feedback including pre and post surveys. The ultimate goal is these resources will empower non-English speaking families to make safe sleep decisions that help save newborn lives.

Project Goal

The overarching goal of the project is to collaborate with interdisciplinary groups and community members to create safe sleep educational material that will be available in several languages beyond English that are culturally-sensitive while meeting AAP guidelines for safe infant sleep.

Project Objective 1

SMART goal #1: Coordinate and conduct focus groups to be completed by July 2024 with community members, community organizations and healthcare stakeholders (including CHOA- Emory residents) to discuss key infant safe sleep messaging. 

Project Objective 2

SMART goal #2: Co-design a script for the safe sleep messaging videos by August 2024 in 2-4 key cultural/language groups. Work with interpreters and project staff members to create them in a culturally sensitive manner respective to the various languages and cultures that we use. 

Project Objective 3

SMART goal #3: By January 2025, videos will be distributed for patient care. We will evaluate and gather feedback on how we can improve our information distribution for refugee communities via further focus groups with key project stakeholders through May 2025. 

AAP District

District X

Institutional Name

Emory University

Contact 1

Andrew Potter, DO