The National Violent Death Reporting System: an exciting new tool for public health surveillance

Abstract

The US does not have a unified system for surveillance of violent deaths. This report describes the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), a system for collecting data on all violent deaths (homicides, suicides, accidental firearms deaths, deaths of undetermined intent, and deaths from legal intervention, excluding legal executions) in participating states. The NVDRS centralizes data from many sources, providing a more comprehensive picture of violent deaths than would otherwise be available. The NVDRS collects data on victims, suspects, and circumstances related to the violent deaths. Currently, 17 US states participate in the NVDRS; the intention is for the NVDRS to become a truly national system, representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the US territories. This report describes the history of the NVDRS, provides an overview of how the NVDRS functions, and describes future directions.

Surveillance for Violent Deaths — National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 States, 2013

“…Surveillance is essential to monitoring the prevalence and incidence of violence-related fatal injuries, defining priorities, and directing programmatic and violence prevention activities (41). Development and expansion of NVDRS are crucial to public health efforts at the federal, state, and local levels to reduce violence and the personal, familial, and societal consequences and costs.…”

Firearm-Related Injuries Affecting the Pediatric Population

“…Suspects and multiple victims can be studied together, allowing for comparisons of victim and perpetrator characteristics. [6][7][8] The NVDRS can provide useful information concerning childhood mortality from firearms; limited raw data from this system are now available online. 1 …”

Unintentional firearm deaths: A comparison of other-inflicted and self-inflicted shootings

“…CDC staff send corrections to the states on an ongoing basis to improve coding. NVDRS has been described in further detail elsewhere (Steenkamp et al, 2006). Data for this study are from the NVDRSs Restricted Access Dataset (RAD) for the years 2003-2006, released in January 2009.…”

“…Data on the circumstances of unintentional firearm fatalities in the United States have recently become available from the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Hemenway et al, 2009;Karch et al, 2008;Steenkamp et al, 2006). The NVDRS includes data related to the circumstances of unintentional firearm fatalities for all age groups across 16 states.…”