Background: Many families encounter difficulties in implementing safe sleep advice; these challenges negatively impact infant care practices [1]. Risk minimisation approaches which support ‘safer sleep’ offer practical strategies which are more likely to engage families in risk reduction and infant health promoting behaviours. This presentation will share the process of co-design used to develop the Queensland Safer Infant Sleep clinical guideline to address identified gaps in health professional support.

Methods: The Queensland Clinical Guidelines Unit framework was used to develop a Safer Infant Sleep Clinical Guideline to inform health professional practice in Queensland public and private maternity services. The guideline was informed by contemporary evidence, including the Qld Infant Care Practice Study [2-4] and developed through a collaborative process including health professionals and parent consumers. Using multiple consultation rounds (n=3) with a multidisciplinary working party (n=133 multidisciplinary and consumer members) the guideline was refined into a tiered approach based on family need.

Results: The result of this co-design process was an evidence-based structured guide that addressed safer sleep messages, communication with caregivers, airway protection mechanisms and specific strategies for safer infant sleep. Gist messaging complements list messaging with rationales underpinning messages provided in simple language to assist health professionals is more effectively supporting parents in translating evidence into practice during the first year of life. A tiered approach to tailor interventions for priority families based on identified vulnerabilities has been designed to develop safer sleep plans for every sleep.

Conclusion: The co-designed Safer Infant Sleep clinical guideline provides families a voice in collaborative and informed culturally appropriate decision-making in creating safer infant sleep environments and provides professionals with a tiered approach to protect infants whilst using their clinical judgement and reasoning to meet the needs of families.