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 the exploration of ways to prevent future deaths. There remain many reasons why children die from what could be preventable deaths—incomplete vaccination, premature birth, unsafe infant sleep, child maltreatment, child passenger safety, drowning, suicide, teen driving, and all-terrain vehicle crashes, to name several. There are many multidisciplinary approaches to reviewing the circumstances of child deaths to learn how to prevent future injury and near fatalities. Pediatricians play an important role in this process by participating in their community’s child death review (CDR) teams, which now exist in all 50 US states and most territories. The majority of child deaths in the US are now being systematically reviewed by CDR teams.
When a CDR team assembles to review a case, a story unfolds about the circumstances surrounding the death. Questions 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. CDR teams partner with organizations that have child safety as their mission and use these organizations to implement meaningful prevention strategies.
The Section will focus on initial activities to develop resources and disseminate information about child death reviews 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 instead 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 members through our listserv, at our meetings and programming, and through Chapter and District leadership. Please contact us to become a member, for further information, and to learn about this dynamic section at aap.org.