Impacts of prescription drug monitoring program policy changes and county opioid safety coalitions on prescribing and overdose outcomes in California, 2015-2018.

In 2015, California received funding to implement the Prescription Drug Overdose Prevention Initiative, a 4-year program to reduce deaths involving prescription opioids by 1) leveraging improvements to California's prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) (i.e., mandatory PDMP registration for prescribers and pharmacists), and 2) supporting county opioid safety coalitions.

Collaborative process improvement to enhance injury prevention in child death review.

Objective: To increase the number and quality of injury prevention recommendations made by Washington State (USA) child death review teams.

Design: Before and after study design involving four intervention teams and 21 comparison teams.

Methods: Intervention teams received injury prevention training, collaborative process improvement coaching, and access to web based prevention resources.

Assessing and improving child death review team recommendations.

Background: Child death review teams (CDRTs) are multi-agency, multidisciplinary teams that review the circumstances surrounding child deaths. Although the potential of CDRTs to promote systems improvement and prevention is well recognised, teams often struggle to translate their findings into effective preventive actions.

Objective: To present results from a study assessing the quality of written recommendations in published CDRT reports; and provide guidelines for improving the quality and effectiveness of these written recommendations.

Using capture-recapture methods to better ascertain the incidence of fatal child maltreatment.

Objectives: To (1) test the use of capture-recapture methods to estimate the total number of child maltreatment deaths in a single state using information from death certificates, child welfare reports, child death review teams, and uniform crime reports; and to (2) compare these estimates to the number of maltreatment deaths identified through an in-depth "gold standard" review.

Methods: Child maltreatment deaths were identified in four existing administrative data sources: (1) death reports in our state vital statistics (DC); (2) child death review team reports (CDR); (3) homicide reports filed by our state police agency as uniform crime report (UCR) supplements for the FBI; and (4) abstracted reports of a minor's death from our state child protective services (CPS) agency. Capture-recapture pair-wise and pooled comparisons were then applied to estimate the numbers of abuse and total maltreatment deaths and were compared to the number of cases identified by independent case review.

Passive surveillance of shaken baby syndrome using hospital inpatient data.

Background: The conference from which these articles came addressed the question of public health surveillance for shaken baby syndrome (SBS) and explores one component of a comprehensive SBS surveillance system that would be relatively easy to implement and maintain: passive surveillance based on hospital inpatient data. Provisional exclusion and inclusion criteria are proposed for a two-level case definition of diagnosed SBS (strict definition) and cases presumed to be SBS (broad definition). The strict SBS definition is based on the single SBS code in the ICD-9-CM (995.

Public health surveillance of fatal child maltreatment: analysis of 3 state programs.

Objectives: We sought to describe approaches to surveillance of fatal child maltreatment and to identify options for improving case ascertainment.

Methods: Three states--California, Michigan, and Rhode Island--used multiple data sources for surveillance. Potential cases were identified, operational definitions were applied, and the number of maltreatment deaths was determined.