Evidence-based research is life saving - I should know

Broadly speaking, up to the start of the present public spending squeeze in 2010, the 1967 Lennon and McCartney lyric "It's getting better all the time" has been a good description of the lives of most children in the UK over the past 60 years. The state of the economy meant that fewer families were in poverty, and when things went wrong, public services were developing that could pick up the pieces. Services were developing evidence-based interventions, new technologies were improving the effectiveness of those interventions and public information and education was increasingly focused on prevention.

Recently, though, we have been seeing worrying signs of backwards moves. As always, personal experiences are particularly powerful, and I always take special interest in infant mortality statistics. On 29 May 1987, our darling daughter, Margaret, died unexpectedly in her cot at the age of seven months. As part of my efforts to understand "why", I started reading up on sudden infant death syndrome and the work of the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID). The FSID has now morphed into the Lullaby Trust but its work continues.