South Australian parents shouldn't take their infants with them to their beds after the SA health passed new guidelines about safe sleeping.

The new sleeping guidelines were recommended after state coroner Mark Johns discovered in an inquest that five babies had been crushed to death by sleeping adults in cases as far back as July 2007. Autopsy findings in one case revealed that a month-old baby girl had been suffocated as she was trapped in between the couch cushions after she fell asleep with her father.

Health Minister John Hill said parents should keep their babies in their own beds and not to sleep with the infants in the parents' beds.

"The safest place for your baby to sleep is in its own cot in the same room as you, not with you on the couch, the bed or any other place," Hill said.

"Obviously families like to be close and parents like to be doing the right thing and they think sometimes putting the baby in the bed with them is a safe practice, but of course large adult bodies can crush a small child or the child can get lost in the bed and suffocate," he said.

The new guidelines also provided other recommendations including letting infants sleep on their backs, keeping their heads and faces uncovered, providing a safe sleeping environment, letting the infant sleep in the same room as its parents in the first six or 12 months and avoiding exposure to cigarette smoke before and after birth.

An infant health researcher at Adelaide's Women's and Children's Hospital Dr Susan Beal hopes the new guidelines will lower the risk of infant death in Australia.

"The actual incidence of sudden, unexpected deaths now is down in South Australia to less than 10 per cent of what it was 15 years ago."