Child fatality review and programs to prevent child maltreatment deaths

The death of a child is a sentinel event for a community, prompting a need to understand the cause and to prevent additional deaths. A substantial number of children who die as a result of maltreatment were previously known to children's protective services. Child fatality review (CFR) is one means of understanding child maltreatment deaths and developing efforts to prevent them. CFR teams are made up of community members from various disciplines who convene in an effort to recommend prevention efforts. A number of prevention programs have been developed in the United States and Canada that show meaningful promise for reducing the number of child fatalities. These include Choose Your Partner Carefully programs and Period Of Purple Crying, both of which have demonstrated empirical support. Working with immigrant and refugee families is also crucial to reducing child fatalities. Among the strategies that CFR teams should utilize to spread the prevention message is to develop a mass media campaign.