A cuddle cot is a small cooling device placed inside a bassinet or crib that allows grieving parents to spend extended time with their baby after a stillbirth or neonatal death. By gently cooling the baby’s body to around 46°F (8°C), the device slows the natural changes that occur after death, giving families hours or even days to hold their child, say goodbye, and create memories they would otherwise lose.
How a Cuddle Cot Works
The system uses thermoelectric cooling rather than refrigeration, which keeps it small, quiet, and lightweight. A cooling pad connects by hose to a compact unit filled with purified water. The pad sits beneath the baby inside a standard bassinet, covered by a blanket or sheet so it remains discreet. Parents can hold, dress, and photograph their baby without any visible medical equipment in the way.
The target temperature of 46°F was chosen as a balance between effective tissue preservation, minimizing condensation on the baby’s skin, and keeping the baby comfortable enough for parents to hold. The device cools enough to preserve the body without making the baby feel unnervingly cold to the touch.
How Long Families Use It
Most families use a cuddle cot for two to five days, though there is no strict clinical cutoff. Bereavement care guidelines generally treat the decision as family-led, with support from hospital staff. Some parents need just a few hours to feel ready. Others want time for siblings, grandparents, or close friends to visit and meet the baby. The cooling system makes all of these choices possible, where previously families had very limited time before the hospital needed to move the baby to a morgue.
Why Extra Time Matters
Losing a baby is a sudden, disorienting grief, and the pressure of a ticking clock can make it worse. With a cuddle cot, parents can bathe and dress their baby, take handprints or footprints, hold the baby skin to skin, or simply sit together as a family. These moments become the only physical memories parents will ever have.
The device also gives families practical breathing room. Arranging a funeral, contacting family members who live far away, or simply processing what has happened all take time. Being able to keep the baby nearby in their hospital room, rather than separated in a different part of the building, helps parents move through early grief at their own pace. As one parent described the experience to Mayo Clinic: “When you’re saying goodbye forever, every minute you have with them counts so much.”
Availability and Cost
Cuddle cots are manufactured by Flexmort, a UK-based company, with components made in China, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In the US, a standard system for pre-term and full-term babies starts at around $2,950. UK hospitals can purchase one for about £1,200 before tax. A larger version called the CuddleBlanket, designed for children age one and older, costs significantly more.
Most hospitals do not purchase cuddle cots through their regular equipment budgets. Instead, the devices are overwhelmingly funded through charitable donations, often driven by bereaved families who experienced a loss without one and want to spare other parents the same regret. Fundraising campaigns, memorial foundations, and nonprofit organizations have placed thousands of units in maternity and neonatal wards worldwide.
In the UK, cuddle cots are now widely available across hospital maternity units, and a significant proportion of bereaved parents who are offered one choose to use it. Availability in the US is less uniform. Larger hospitals and those with dedicated perinatal bereavement programs are more likely to have one on hand, while smaller or rural facilities may not. If you are facing this situation and your hospital does not have a cuddle cot, ask your care team whether one can be borrowed or transferred from a nearby facility. Some nonprofit organizations maintain loaner programs for exactly this purpose.
What Staff Training Looks Like
One challenge with cuddle cots is that formal training on the equipment remains limited. A UK study published in the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central found that despite widespread adoption, many healthcare professionals received little structured guidance on setting up or maintaining the device. This left staff relying on informal knowledge passed between colleagues, which occasionally led to usage errors. The gap highlights a broader issue in bereavement care: the emotional support around baby loss has improved considerably in recent years, but the practical logistics sometimes lag behind.
For parents, the takeaway is straightforward. If a nurse or midwife seems unfamiliar with the equipment, that does not mean anything is wrong with the device itself. The cooling system is mechanically simple, and staff can usually troubleshoot setup within minutes.