Welcome to the Section on Child Death Review and Prevention. Pediatricians reviewing child deaths now have a home within the AAP to collaborate with other members to “improve the health and well-being of infants, children, adolescents, and young adults by supporting pediatricians and other professionals involved in reviewing deaths to help prevent fatalities and near fatalities.”
The death of a child is a sentinel event for a community, and should prompt it to explore ways to prevent similar deaths in the future. Now that we have eliminated so many infectious disease-related deaths through widespread immunization, there remain other reasons why children die from what could be preventable deaths—premature birth, infant safe sleep issues, child abuse, child passenger issues, drowning, suicide, teen driving and all-terrain vehicle crashes to name several. There are several multidisciplinary approaches to reviewing the circumstances of child deaths to learn how to prevent future child fatalities and near fatalities, and pediatricians play an important role by participating in their community’s child death review (CDR) processes. CDR teams now exist in all 50 US states and most territories, and a substantial proportion of all child deaths in the US are now being systematically reviewed.
When a CDR team assembles to review a case, a story unfolds as to the circumstances surrounding the death. Questions are used to probe where breakdowns in child-serving systems may have occurred; the goal is not to assign blame to a particular agency or individual, but rather to determine how to address these individual and systemic shortcomings to prevent future deaths. Death review teams partner with organizations that have child safety as their mission and use these organizations to implement meaningful prevention strategies.
The Section will focus initial activities developing resources and disseminating information about child death review to its members. It will be a priority of the section not to duplicate efforts of existing AAP sections or the National Center for Child Death Review and Prevention, but rather learn how our section’s expertise can complement these entities. Section activities will focus on education such as CME webinars and NCE programming, and collaboration will occur with AAP Chapters to develop local resources and relationships with state and local death review teams. Section members plan to partner with the AAP and national organizations to spearhead further development and strengthening of child death review and prevention strategies at the national, state, and local levels.
Membership is open to all AAP members and affiliates. The Executive Committee looks forward to hearing from you through our listserv, at our meetings and programming, and through your Chapter and District leadership. Please contact us to become a member, for further information, and to learn about this exciting section at aap.org.