Virginia Maternal Mortality Review Team: Supporting Maternal Mortality Review Committees - Maternal death continues to take a toll in Virginia. A statewide maternal mortality review team and surveillance system that collects data about all female Virginians, who died in Virginia from a natural or unnatural maternal death, is necessary to continue to identify and monitor trends. Without these data to inform prevention and intervention strategies, reducing or eliminating these deaths is not possible, particularly deaths of decedents identified as belonging to a population at risk for maternal deaths. Data specific to populations at risk for maternal deaths is especially important, as the pregnancy-associated death rate for African American women (80.7) between 1999 and 2016 in Virginia was over twice as high as the rate for their White counterparts (35.3). During the past 22 years, the Virginia Maternal Mortality Review Team (VMMRT) has grown to become the go-to program for information about maternal death in Virginia. Because the VMMRT links demographic data with circumstance, toxicology, location of injury and of death, and mechanism of injury, medical history, community service program utilization, substance abuse or misuse status, and provides recommendations to address gaps in medical care, missed prevention strategies and missing health education, prevention and planning stakeholders in Virginia have come to rely on the VMMRT to understand and respond to maternal death in their communities. Through this application, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner proposes to continue statewide maternal mortality surveillance and the existing Virginia Maternal Mortality Review Team (VMRRT) and solidify the partnership with the Virginia Neonatal Perinatal Collaborative (VNPC) in order to prevent maternal death across multiple fronts. The overall mission of this summarized simply: (1) find all relevant pregnancy-associated deaths; (2) understand and abstract them in a timely, complete, and consistent fashion; (3) conduct comprehensive reviews of all cases utilizing a multidisciplinary panel of subject matter experts, (4) organize and analyze the data into reports, summaries, presentations, and dashboards that are meaningful to maternal mortality prevention partners at the state, local, and national levels; (5) advertise and distribute the data widely; (6) evaluate performance and usefulness of the system for purposes of prevention strategies; (7) and evaluate the implementation of prevention strategies from the team’s recommendations.
