PROGRAM ABSTRACT - Pennsylvania
In 2019, there were 2,728 violent deaths in Pennsylvania (PA) with 1,902 deaths from suicide and 721 from homicide. Suicides occurred almost three times more often than homicides. Suicide continues to be a major public health problem in PA and the state’s 2019 age-adjusted rate is higher than the national average (13.9 deaths per 100,000). The age-adjusted homicide rate steadily increased over the past five years, peaking in 2017 at 6.6 deaths per 100,000 persons. The 2019 age-adjusted rate is 6.1 deaths per 100,000 persons. These rate fluctuations mirror national trends of rapidly increasing homicide deaths. While PA has recently seen decreases in some violent deaths it’s still unclear how COVID-19 has affected mental health, injuries, and the frequency of violent deaths.
The continued occurrence of violent deaths in PA indicates the urgent need for a timely and coordinated response. The commonwealth must implement a variety of strategies to reduce violent deaths. However, the means of response will be ineffective if prevention strategies are not based on comprehensive high-quality data.
The purpose of the PAVDRS is to implement a statewide surveillance system to collect and disseminate accurate, timely, and high quality surveillance data on all violent deaths in the state by using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidelines and web-based data entry system. The Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH) will disseminate PAVDRS data to an array of recipients to inform and guide violence prevention efforts ultimately reducing morbidity and mortality related to violence through data to action The DOH will continue implementing the PAVDRS throughout PA. The DOH will continue developing relationships with stakeholders and increase the amount of data providers working with the PAVDRS. This will improve the quantity and quality of data collected which will result in more effective interventions to reduce violent deaths. The DOH will collect and abstract comprehensive data on violent deaths from death certificates (DC), coroner/medical examiner (C/ME) reports including toxicology reports, and law enforcement (LE) reports using the web-based data entry program and guidelines provided by the CDC. The DOH will disseminate PAVDRS data to violence prevention advocates, policymakers, stakeholders, and the public. This will be evidenced by the diffusion of PAVDRS data through presentations, reports, and factsheets geared towards an array of data users. Data will also be distributed through individual requests and ongoing partnerships with key stakeholders. The DOH will explore innovative methods of accessing, reporting, and sharing data that could lead to improved timeliness and greater utilization of data for prevention efforts.
There are five major outcomes the program expects to achieve by the end of the five-year project period. The first outcome will be improved completeness, timeliness, and quality of violent death surveillance data with an emphasis on harder to obtain variables such as sexual orientation, gender identity, and firearm-related information. The second outcome will be stronger relationships with key partners. The third outcome will be increased access to NVDRS data by the public and partners to inform their violence and possibly injury prevention activities. The fourth outcome will be increased use of violent death surveillance data by partners to inform violence prevention programmatic and policy decisions. The fifth outcome will be increased ability to describe the geographic distribution of violent deaths and understand the social determinants of health in relation to violent death-related health disparities.