Hāpai responded to the announcement last week that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and partner Clarke Gayford are expecting their first child in June by congratulating them and formally inviting the Prime Minister to receive a traditional flax baby basket for her baby to sleep in.

“Wahakura is a traditional Māori concept but they are used today among Māori and non-Māori parents alike as safe sleep devices,” says Fay Selby-Law, general manager of the National SUDI Prevention Service at Hāpai Te Hauora. “We will present a wahakura to the Prime Minister as a symbol of our support for all parents and tamariki in Aotearoa.”

The film was the brainchild of Sharon Ayto, a public health nurse and the Southern District Health Board’s Child Youth Mortality Coordinator, who won $10,000 in the 2015 Southern Innovation Challenge towards the educational video to teach early childhood teachers and workers how to model safe sleep practices to preschoolers.

Ayto said the inspiration behind the idea was two preschoolers playing with a doll during a wahakura workshop at Awarua Whānau Services in Invercargill. The girls put their ‘baby’ in the pram and covered the doll completely with the available blankets. She realised doll-play was an opportunity to guide ‘tomorrow’s parents’ in safe sleep practices.

Every year in New Zealand about 50 babies die from Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy (SUDI). SUDI can occur when infants are sleeping in an unsafe sleep environment and many SUDI incidents can be prevented by ensuring every sleep is a safe sleep. 

“By introducing safe sleep messages to preschoolers in doll-play, we are creating an ongoing generation of individuals who have safe sleep practices as their norm,” said Ayto. The simple message that teachers are taught to give to preschoolers is Face Up, Face Clear, Safe Place.

Jenny Humphries, Southern DHB’s midwifery director, said it was a wonderful initiative as it was such a simple and innovative idea that could be shared with early childhood teachers and support staff across New Zealand and even wider afield.

Featuring in the film are children from the Southern Institute of Technology (SIT) Early Learning Centre, early childhood teacher Emily Wilson, Change for Our Children founding director Stephanie Cowan, and paediatrician Dr Viliame Sotutu.

The 13-minute video is now available on YouTube.

The programme, being lead by Māori public health organisation Hāpai Te Hauora, will from September start providing safe sleeping devices such as woven wahukura or plastic peps-pods to families identified as needing them in their baby’s first year of life.  Accidental suffocation through parents sharing a bed with their baby is one of the main preventable risks of SUDI.

The campaign aims to reduce the overall rate of SUDI in New Zealand by 86 per cent overall and 94 per cent for Māori.  Health Minister Jonathan Coleman said this would reduce the number of SUDI deaths a year by 44 to six.

The campaign would also target reducing another of the major preventable risks – exposure to tobacco smoke during pregnancy and will include innovative approaches to reducing smoking.  The programme will also encourage immunisation, breastfeeding and sleeping babies on their backs.