For the price of a single meal at Subway Alice Elio teaches child care providers how to save babies from a killer of infants that medical experts cannot predict.
“The number of babies dying from sudden infant death syndrome in secondary care is appalling,” Elio said as she prepared herself for an intensive training session in a simple yet elegant room at the Buncombe County Child Care Center on 59 Woodfin Place.
Elio, now a Buncombe county health-care consultant and leader of the ITS-SIDS child care training workshop in downtown Asheville, began her career in child care at the Mamieo Stookey school for children with special needs in Illinois. She taught essential SIDS prevention techniques to child care providers in Asheville after working for Buncombe County’s disease control division.
“The prevalence of SIDS deaths in child care was the whole reason that a new law in 2003 was enacted by the Division of Child Development,” Elio said. “Looking at the statistics showing that the number of kids dying in child care was way too high they said, ‘What is going on here?’”
The 2003 Safe Seep legislation mandates N.C. child care providers complete educational programs designed to teach preventative measures for SIDS.
Elio’s classes, held in a conference room at the BCCCC, uses the American Academy of Pediatrics’ 64-page instruction manual as the foundation for teaching concepts to aspiring child care providers.
“I believe that once you have a standard and you’re aware of the standard that you should be following it as practice and if something goes wrong you have protected everyone involved,” said Kay Riddles.
A participant of Elio’s class, Riddles is the director of Candler based Hominy Baptist Child Care and has been working with children for over 25 years.
“The SIDS programs that the state has mandated are critical to learning how to properly care for infants,” said Riddles. “I will only hire individuals who have sought out and completed the training.”
One of the toughest issues ITS-SIDS seeks to remedy are antique ideas about child rearing that many parents cling to because it is the way their family has raised children for generations
“Some parents will request to have their child put to sleep on his or her tummy, or with a comfort item such as a stuffed animal,” said participant and child care worker Felisha Burke. “I have worked for Children and Friends home day care center for 19 years, and every so often I deal with a parent who insists that we bend our rules to make the child ‘transition easier’ into a new setting,” she said.
“We have to explain to them that what they’re doing is putting their child at risk and we follow state operating procedures strictly,” she said.
Despite the expressed adherence to state mandated child care laws, the SIDS rate in child care remains static at a daunting/mysterious 20 percent. This begs the question of whether or not the classes are diagnosing and seeking to eliminate the right causes of SIDS, a phenomenon that scientists do not fully understand. Still, some care workers believe that the findings concerning the SIDS rate are not accurate.
“Hominy Child Care practices what the training courses are teaching as the best preventative techniques for SIDS, though other causes of it may still be unknown,” said Riddles.
“Never once have I had a case of SIDS on my watch.”
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