A south-central Indiana hospital is joining the fight against the Hoosier State's unusually high infant mortality rate, and the solution has its roots more than 4,000 miles away in Finland.
Indiana's infant mortality rate is one of the worst in the U.S. In 2014, more than seven of every 1,000 babies died before reaching the age of one, ranking the state 39th in the nation.
But on the other side of the Atlantic, Finland repeatedly boasts one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world - the country saw only 2 per 1,000 infants die in 2013, according to data from United Nations institution World Bank.
That rate comes thanks, in part, to a cardboard box. The boxes are distributed free of cost and serve as a type of starter kit for new moms.
Finland's government began providing the boxes, filled with all the essentials for a newborn baby, to mothers in the late 1930s. Much of the country was in poverty, and infant mortality was high.
Now, a group of women at Greene County General Hospital in Linton is adopting the Nordic tradition in hopes of battling the area's rate of infant mortality, which, with 8.9 infants per 1,000 in the Wabash Valley dying before age one, is higher than the state's.
"This project is meant to encourage mothers to seek early prenatal care consistently throughout their pregnancy - follow their doctors' orders so that they have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery and a healthy baby," OB Nurse Manager Teresa Hutton says. "It's our attempt to see if we can reach out to those girls and see how that works and see how our numbers end up."
The box equips new parents with an assortment of resources to care for their newborn. Inside is a health kit, alongside blankets, cloth diapers, pacifiers, bottles and other necessities. The women also elected to include a small book about practicing safe sleep among the other pieces of safety literature.
At the bottom of the bundle is a waterproof mattress, which comes standard and allows the box to function as a safe space for the baby to sleep.
The idea of letting a newborn baby sleep in a cardboard box might seem foreign to some, Hutton says, but ensuring the baby has a safe area for sleeping - no pillows or blankets, no loose sheets, no stuffed animals - is pivotal to combating infant mortality.
"When mom is tired, she tends to want to put the baby in bed with her," Hutton says. "She doesn't want to go into the nursery, she doesn't want to get up to the crib...accidents happen that way."
Hutton says the box gives new parents the ability to keep their newborn in the same room without sleeping with the baby.
And, despite the somewhat offbeat concept, Chief Nursing Officer Lea Ann Camp says the project has received overwhelming support.
"Absolutely everyone we've talked to is extremely excited about it," Camp says. "We had a mother who had delivered about six months ago look at the box, and she thought it was a great idea. We had another mom who had lost a baby to SIDS at nap time who thought it was an excellent idea as well, so we believe that we have great support for it."
The group intends to sign women up for what they're calling the "Sweet Dreams Baby Bundle." After enrolling, the hospital will monitor the prenatal health of those in the program.
The group hasn't finished crafting all the policies for the program, but Hutton says most of the program's requirements will require women to attend all the necessary doctors' appointments and keep their health in check. As an additional tobacco cessation measure, that includes not smoking during pregnancy. After meeting the program's requirements, the women will be gifted with their baby bundle.
And the program may also target those specifically in need.
"We do have moms that we know go home with not all of the pieces they need to take care of the infant, so that was part of the reason for developing the box," Camp says.
The hospital hopes to begin distributing the bundles in the fall. A grant from a local energy cooperative funded the first 50 boxes, and the women say they hope other sources of funding and donations to the hospital's foundation will sustain the project. Camp says the bundles are already catching the eyes of other nearby hospitals.
