Crossposted from Public Health Insider

Since 2003, not a single child in King County has died from a helmet-preventable bicycle injury.

What helped lead to this victory? King County’s Child Death Review – a collaborative effort to identify opportunities and interventions that prevent children from dying.

As the ‘doctor’ for the community, we are responsible for looking at broad trends and understanding the systems, policies and practices in our community that can prevent disease and death.  Our local hospitals look at deaths in their systems, and we look at deaths in our communities to see if more can be done to prevent future deaths.

Child Death Review (CDR) recounts the details of unexpected and unintentional deaths that occur in King County. Several times a year, three-hour CDR meetings are scheduled based on need, two months in advance. Each CDR covers six to eight cases and focuses on a specific manner of death (traffic-related death, suicide, overdose, etc.) and results in recommendations for prevention. CDR started as a statewide funded effort in 1998, but it was cut from the budget in 2003. Given the importance of this work, we have prioritized CDR and funded it locally.

Read more at the Public Health Insider website.