article_snippet.sent: ’s bed has led a coroner to demand new guidelines to warn parents of the dangers of sleeping next to newborns.
article_snippet.sent: At a seven-week-old baby in his mother’s inquest this week, a coroner in Pembrokeshire said new parents were given ‘confusing’ advice over how tired new parents could be when new parents slept in the same bed as new parents child.
article_snippet.sent: ‘reducing the risk of cot death’ leaflet, which offers similar advice to the NHS in England, says parents should not share a bed with a young baby if parents ‘feel very tired’, take drugs, smoke, or have drunk alcohol.
article_snippet.sent: But coroner Mark Layton said: ‘The advice is that it is not wrong to share a bed with a young baby – but you should refrain from doing so if you are “excessively tired”.
article_snippet.sent: It is a fact of life that parents or carers of a young infant would be very tired because of a young baby erratic sleep pattern.
article_snippet.sent: It suggests that it’s okay to go to sleep with a young baby if you are not very tired.
article_snippet.sent: But very few people will sleep unless very few people’re actually tired.
article_snippet.sent: The bedsharing guidance does stress that the safest place for a baby under six months to sleep is in the safest place for a baby under six months to sleep own cot in the same room as a baby parents.
article_snippet.sent: But new mothers sometimes struggle with this – especially if new mothers are breastfeeding – because the easiest place to do this is in bed.
article_snippet.sent: Pembrokeshire Coroner Mark Layton said the current advice on 'co-sleeping' is 'confusing' Pembrokeshire Coroner’s Court heard how attempts were made to resuscitate Efan but Pembrokeshire Coroner Mark Layton could not be saved.
article_snippet.sent: A spokesman for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), which issues health guidelines in England and Wales, said: ‘Sharing a bed with your baby at night can aid breastfeeding and in some cultures, co-sleeping is seen as perfectly normal.
article_snippet.sent: But the Department of Health advises that the safest place for a baby to sleep is in a cot.
article_snippet.sent: The clinical director of the NHS watchdog has admitted guidelines for preventing cot deaths are ‘confusing’.
article_snippet.sent: the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published advice for England and Wales in December which told parents there was a strong link between co-sleeping and cot death, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
article_snippet.sent: But guidelines do not tell women women shouldn’t bring women babies into bed – even though it makes the risk of death five times higher.
article_snippet.sent: the NHS watchdog stopped short of telling women not to take babies to bed in case the advice interfered with breastfeeding guidelines.
article_snippet.sent: We’re not telling people not to co-sleep
article_snippet.sent: The only recommendation We could have made would be to avoid co-sleeping, but it would be seen as incompatible with breastfeeding guidelines.
article_snippet.sent: There are currently around 300 cot deaths in the UK every year.
article_snippet.sent: However Professor Bob Carpenter, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has estimated that around 120 cot deaths could be prevented every year in the UK if parents were advised not to co-sleep.
highlights_snippet.sent: Well cared-for and loved' baby was found 'face-down and unresponsive'
  Coroner says advice should be changed to suggest never bed-sharing .
  
highlights_snippet.sent: NHS says not to if parents smoke, drink, have taken drugs or are very tired .
  