Collecting Violent Death Information Using the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS)

Description

Violence is a major public health problem. Over 64,000 people died violently in the U.S. in 2016. These violent deaths included 44,965 suicides and 19,362 homicides. Violent deaths have been estimated to cost more than $77 billion in medical care and lost productivity. Violence is preventable. Interventions, strategies, and policies are increasingly available that stop violence before it happens. Preventing violence is a critical public health goal because violence inflicts a substantial toll on individuals, families, and communities throughout the US. In order to prevent violence, we must first know the facts about violent deaths. This NOFO builds on previous and current work within the Division of Violence Prevention (DVP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to conduct surveillance of violence and to prevent violence.In 2002, CDC began implementing the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS, OMB No. 0920-0607). NVDRS is a state-based surveillance system that uses CDC guidelines and a CDC web-based data entry system to link data from Death Certificate (DC), Coroner/Medical Examiner (CME) reports including toxicology, and Law Enforcement (LE) reports to assist each participating state, territory, or district in designing and implementing tailored prevention and intervention efforts (See http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/nvdrs/index.html). As a state-based system, successful applicants collect and analyze data for their target area while CDC provides guidance to ensure the data are collected in a standardized manner and supplies access to a web-based data entry system. All successful applicants share their de-identified data with CDC. CDC combines successful applicant data into a multi-state database that informs national stakeholders. NVDRS summary data from 2003 to 2015 are available at: http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/nvdrs.html.NVDRS collects information on who dies violently, where victims are killed, when they are killed, and what factors were perceived to contribute to or precipitate the death. A violent death is defined as a death resulting from the intentional use of physical force or power (e.g., threats or intimidation) against oneself, another person, or against a group or community. This includes all homicides, suicides, and deaths occurring when law enforcement exerts deadly force in the line of duty. In addition, successful applicants will be required to collect information about unintentional firearm injury deaths (i.e., incidents in which the person causing the injury did not intend to discharge the firearm) and on deaths where the intent cannot be determined ("undetermined deaths") but where there is evidence that force was used. Although these deaths are not considered violent deaths by the above definition, information is collected on these types of death because some of these deaths may have been violent. NVDRS is the first system to: 1) provide detailed information on circumstances precipitating all types of violent deaths including brief narratives that summarize what happened in the violent death incident, 2) combine information across multiple data sources, and 3) link multiple deaths that are related to one another (e.g., multiple victim homicides, suicide pacts, and cases of homicide followed by the suicide of the suspect). The NVDRS Implementation Manual is available at: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/2014-NVDRS-Implementation-Manual-and-Appendix_Combined.pdf

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