By shining a light on stillbirth, and highlighting ways to improve care to prevent stillbirth, we have achieved better outcomes for women and their families through implementation of the Safer Baby Bundle (SBB). The SBB is a national initiative with five evidence-based elements to address key areas where improved practice can reduce the number of stillborn babies.
The birth of a baby who is stillborn is a profoundly devastating experience for parents, their extended families and friends, and their healthcare providers. With the knowledge that many stillbirths could be prevented through better understanding and care during pregnancy, we introduce the Safer Baby Bundle (SBB) with a goal to reduce the rate of stillbirths in Australia by 20%.
It has been fantastic to see how midwives and doctors, parents, researchers, and policy makers have come together with a shared purpose. The SBB is now rolled out across all states and territories in Australia, Strong collaboration with Departments of Health to implement the SBB has been crucial to ensuring high visibility, acceptability, and feasibility of the national rollout. This work is being done in partnership with health departments across Australia and key stillbirth advocacy organisations, Stillbirth Foundation Australia and Still Aware.
The SBB for Australian maternity healthcare professionals is a collection of change ideas or interventions designed to reduce late pregnancy stillbirth. The interventions are based on evidence summaries developed in partnership with the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand (PSANZ).
The Safer Baby Bundle consists of 5 elements designed to reduce stillbirth rates after 28 weeks' gestation.
Continuity of Carer - in addition to the five bundle elements, we emphasise the need for maternity services to address the other important aspects of best practice care to reduce stillbirth rates. This includes the recommendation that maternity services increase the availability of midwifery continuity of care models to all women (reducing the risk of fragmentation of care) and particularly for women at increased risk of stillbirth.
Implementation of the SBB has successfully decreased the gap between what is known and what is done in maternity care to prevent stillbirth and ensure women have safer pregnancies.
Despite substantial disruptions posed by the COVID pandemic, preliminary evaluations show that maternity healthcare professionals across Australia have engaged well with the SBB initiative and improved their practices for monitoring and detecting if a baby is not growing well enough (a key strategy to prevent stillbirth). Reassuringly, the changes in practice because of the SBB do not appear to increase obstetric intervention or preterm birth rates.
Exceptional outcomes in Victoria, the first jurisdiction to implement the program, demonstrated the initiative was able to safely reduce the number of women experiencing late gestation stillbirth by 21%. Nationally, a reduction in the late gestation stillbirth rate is not yet observed, however, all components of the SBB are yet to be fully embedded into standard care across maternity services. Also, the impact of COVID in potentially raising stillbirth rates may have mitigated the reductions in other jurisdictions that commenced later than Victoria.
Evidence-based SBB educational programs and resources have been collaboratively designed for maternity healthcare professionals. Since launching more than 11,000 midwives, doctors and other maternity healthcare professionals have completed the Safer Baby Bundle E-learning modules. The Stillbirth CRE partnered with leading professional colleges and research institutions across Australia to develop and more recently update these resources.
Head to SaferBaby.org.au to find out more.
We are committed to reducing the inequity in stillbirth rates. We are working together on adapted and tailored resources for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Parents and specific language groups with targeted support to help multicultural and refugee communities.
