24th March 2006

Welcome to this very special day, The Newcastle permanent Charitable foundation has provided SIDS and Kids Hunter Region a grant of $30,000-00 for their peer supporter training program

SIDS and Kids Hunter Region began in 1977 as bereaved families supporting other newly bereaved families. Over the past 29 years, the organisation has been providing support, without any state government assistance, to families whose babies had died from sudden infant death syndrome. Since the late 1990’s the organisation extended this support to any death of a child eg stillbirth, neonatal, fast onset illness, accidents etc

It is a great partnership between the Newcastle Perm Charitable Foundation and SIDS and Kids Hunter Region as they both stem from the same essence of hunter supporting hunter

The funding from the foundation will enable us to train new peer support volunteers. The benefits of peer support have been identified through research and anecdotally as extremely beneficial to newly bereaved families.

Although our SIDS death rates have fallen to an amazing .2 / 1000 live births, recent stats state that 8 / 1000 births die in the Perinatal period – that is from 20 weeks gestation to 20 days of live.. These figures are alarmingly high and SIDS and Kids Hunter Region aim to provide support to those families affected by this in the Hunter. For 2005 we had over 70 new referrals by families who are affected by these deaths

The Newcastle Permanent Charitable foundation grant will therefore assist our peer support training program to achieve this goal

Visit the Newcastle Permanent Charitable Foundation website