Building Fatality Review Teams
The National Center helps communities build effective multidisciplinary fatality review teams and supports these teams with guidance, tools, and resources to translate insights into impact, to address preventable deaths.
To uncover lessons from deaths, it helps to have multiple people – who have unique perspectives – reviewing a death. Strong partnerships across different sectors are important to translate insights into impact.
Communities, states, and tribal nations with effective fatality review processes have found success through broad, multidisciplinary teams.
Team members may work for public agencies, hospitals or clinics, universities, or community-based organizations – and may bring first-hand, personal experience with unexpected and preventable deaths.
Perspectives and roles often include:
- People who respond directly to a death, such as a coroner, medical examiner, or law enforcement official
- People who work in specialized services such as child welfare, child safety, child protective services, behavioral health services, or programs for service members, veterans, and their families
- People who focus on improving maternal and child health
- Epidemiologists or other experts in public health data analysis
- Bereavement professionals, such as grief counselors, pregnancy loss specialists, or social workers
- People who work in injury prevention, violence prevention, or suicide prevention
- People who have lost a loved one in an unexpected or preventable death
The National Center for Fatality Review and Prevention includes skilled facilitators and staff with the experience to help you establish, design, or improve your program. If you’re looking for a training, technical assistance, or other support, send us a message using this form. This helps us connect you to the person with the right background to meet your needs.