Health

What we don’t know is killing us.

Creating a Constituency for Change: National Violent Death Reporting System

Challenge: Fifty thousand Americans die violently every year. But we know very little about the circumstances and contributing factors – details that could help prevent future suicides and homicides. While the U.S. government tracks such data for road fatalities, it doesn’t for violent deaths.

Approach: Beginning in 2000, Fenton was the lead communications agency for a foundation-funded national campaign led by a coalition of the leading public health and medical groups in the country that advocated for collecting violent death data at the federal level. We developed the communications strategy to promote the coalition’s advocacy efforts as well as the National Violent Injury Statistics System (NVISS), a pilot data tracking system housed at the Harvard School of Public Health. Our strategy involved reframing the issue of violent deaths as a public health problem that required public health solutions; creating a powerful and diverse constituency for the system, including medical examiners, police chiefs and domestic violence prevention advocates; producing a campaign tool kit and trainings to grow the support base; and providing a comprehensive media and public affairs strategy.

Progress, Accelerated: In 2002, Congress allocated $1.5 million to the CDC to establish a National Violent Death Reporting System. Since then, 18 states have joined the system and the annual appropriation has grown. Data from NVDRS has been used for violence prevention activities, including a study in Oregon that found that 37% of older adults who died by suicide had visited a physician in the preceding month, an insight that spurred the state to launch a plan to help doctors identify the warning signs.