February 2006Vol. 7, No. 1A Program Manual for Child Death Review

Child death review (CDR) is a process that works toward understanding the cause of a child's death in order to prevent harm to other children. To facilitate this effort across the States, the National Center for Child Death Review has released a new version of its comprehensive manual A Program Manual for Child Death Review: Strategies to Better Understand Why Children Die and Taking Action to Prevent Child Deaths.

The manual describes strategies for developing State or local CDR programs and CDR teams. The information and tools needed to establish, manage, and evaluate effective review teams are provided. Best practices, based on the authors' experiences in implementing CDR in their States, are identified throughout the manual. A chapter of tools provides job descriptions, sample documents, and meeting agenda, as well as guides that include information relevant to specific kinds of deaths, for example, burning or sudden infant death syndrome.

A Program Manual for Child Death Review was edited by T. Covington, V. Foster, and S. Rich and was produced with support from the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, Health Resources and Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

www.childdeathreview.org/Finalversionprotocolmanual.pdf (PDF 367 KB)