Document Outlines Tools for Developing an Ongoing Child-Maltreatment Surveillance System
April 23, 2008
Child Maltreatment Surveillance: Uniform Definitions for Public Health and Recommended Data Elements defines child maltreatment, presents associated terms, and recommends data elements for voluntary use by individuals and organizations in the public health community. The document, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, is designed to help state and local health department staff collect public health surveillance data on child maltreatment, as well as to provide a framework for doing so. The document is intended to promote and improve consistency of child maltreatment surveillance for public health practices. Contents are divided into two major sections. The first section provides a conceptual definition of child maltreatment and associated terms. The second section provides recommended data elements and is further divided into basic data elements and expanded data elements. The basic data elements represent fundamental information that should be collected in a child-maltreatment-surveillance system and that are relatively easy to collect. The expanded data elements comprise basic data elements and also include contextual variables (child, incident, caregiver, and household and family variables), which may be more difficult to collect. The document is available online.
Readers: This document is the third in a series of Uniform Definitions and Recommended Data Elements.
