RECOMMENDATION
GENERATOR



The importance of prevention in Child Death Review

Your team should never consider a death review complete until asking:
What are we going to do to prevent this from happening again? There is prevention potential for all natural, intentional, unintentional, and even undetermined child deaths. Reviews should be seen as opportunities to identify any preventive action that could be taken by individuals, agencies, the larger community or the state to prevent similar deaths in the future.

How this form is useful and who should use it

This recommendation generator form was adapted from the “Effective Recommendation Writing Guidelines” developed for California Child Death Review Teams through the FCANS Program of the EPIC Branch, California Department of Health Services¹. This tool can be used to formulate effective recommendations, identify key individuals (intervention actors, recipients, person(s) accountable) and follow up on recommendations for preventive action. Use this template as a guideline to shape discussion as your team crafts its prevention recommendations.

Child Death Review Teams do not have to lead the prevention action through from start to finish. Utilizing appointed subcommittees, task forces, coalitions, or partnerships with existing community agencies are options for acting on recommendations. This recommendation template can be used by Teams or agencies that:

  1. craft the preventive action to be carried out;
  2. carry out the recommendation action; or
  3. follow-up on the proposed action.



¹ This document was adapted from the “Guidelines for Writing Effective Recommendations” tool developed through the joint efforts of Stephen Wirtz, PhD and Valodi Foster, MPH of the Fatal Child Abuse and Neglect Surveillance Program of the Epidemiology and Prevention for Injury Control Branch, California Department of Health Services.

This recommendation template form was made available through an Emergency Medical Services for Children Targeted Issues grant “Improving Injury Prevention Capacity in the Child Death Review Process” (1 H34MC02543) through a partnership between the Washington State Department of Health, the Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center, and the Seattle Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the California Department of Health Services or the Emergency Medical Services for Children Program.