Local Child Fatality Review Team: Role of the Mental Health Provider
Child Fatality Review (CFR) is a multidisciplinary process to help us better understand why children in our community die and to help us identify how we can prevent future deaths.
Local Child Fatality Review Teams will meet with varying frequency to review sudden, unexpected, and unexplained deaths, deaths investigated by DCS, and those deaths classified as undetermined, homicide, suicide, or accident, for all children under the age of eighteen. Team members will share case information on child deaths that occur in their region with the goal of preventing future deaths. In order for this team to be successful, all agencies involved in the safety, health, and protection of children must be involved.
The death of a child is a tragic event. Reviewing the circumstances involved in every death is part of our job as professionals and requires our time and commitment. Only then can we truly understand how to better protect our children and prevent future deaths from occurring.
- The mental health provider can make available to the team information on:
- Interpreting the results of psychological examinations
- Family history of mental health treatment
- The mental health provider can offer the team expertise on:
- The effects of trauma
- Mental health issues
- Substance abuse issues
- The mental health provider can support the team with assistance by:
- Facilitating access to mental health records for the family
- Assessing the family’s current need for mental health services
- Providing information about available mental health services
- The mental health provider can help build bridges by:
- Learning about the policies and practices of other agencies through team participation
- Acting as liaison between the CFR team and the jurisdiction’s other mental health agencies and providers
- Explaining to the team how to improve coordination with mental health agencies