HARRISBURG \u2014 The Pennsylvania Department of Health received $242,000 in this year\u2019s budget to help county teams review the deaths of children, a state mandate many have struggled to keep up with.<\/p>\n
The allocation is a fraction of the $2.5 million that Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed earlier this year for the Child Death Review program, and some advocates say it won\u2019t be enough to make major changes to the failing system.<\/p>\n
The program requires counties to maintain a board of local officials to analyze the circumstances surrounding every death of a person under 21 to inform prevention efforts. However, just half of all cases<\/a> have been reviewed by local teams since 2020, and county officials say they are overwhelmed by the time-consuming, complicated state mandate.<\/p>\n The Shapiro administration said it was disappointed by the funding. It sought to revamp counties\u2019 efforts with new state-level staff, grant opportunities, and a public education campaign. Much of that plan appears unachievable, given the limited funding available.<\/p>\n Still, the Department of Health said in a statement after the budget became law that even the more modest funding will \u201cprovide much needed resources to support this important, yet underfunded, public health initiative.\u201d<\/p>\n The agency will use the money to \u201cexplore additional staff members\u201d and \u201cincrease our capacity\u201d to help county review teams improve data collection and analysis, and develop prevention recommendations that local officials can act on.<\/p>\n Advocates pursuing improvements to the Child Death Review program are disappointed that Shapiro\u2019s full pitch didn\u2019t make it into the final budget.<\/p>\n Cathleen Palm, founder of the Center for Children’s Justice, said the $242,000 is \u201can insulting number\u201d and that state policymakers need to step back and figure out their real plan to prevent child deaths. She has been skeptical for months that lawmakers would prioritize Shapiro\u2019s proposed funding for the program.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reality is that we’re continuing to ask local teams to do things that the state itself has not created its own infrastructure\u201d to implement, Palm said. \u201cThis is about the humanity of children and how we learn and live, and work to protect them and keep them alive.\u201d<\/p>\n County Child Death Review teams consist of local healthcare professionals, law enforcement, child protective service providers, and a coroner or medical examiner. Most of these officials volunteer their time alongside their regular paid positions. The state mandate requires these teams to synthesize data to identify trends and turn that information into concrete death prevention recommendations \u2014 a tall order.<\/p>\n Local members of the review teams and advocates for improving the system told Spotlight PA that state funding and coordination of data collection would be extremely helpful. Shapiro\u2019s proposal offered a potential solution, and there appeared to be some support for fully funding it.<\/p>\n Shapiro\u2019s father, a pediatrician, sits on a local review team and told Spotlight PA<\/a> he was in conversations with his son\u2019s administration about improving the program. And the Republican state senator who authored legislation that initially created the review mandate, Lisa Baker of Luzerne County, said she was open to reevaluating the system.<\/p>\n But lawmakers this year did not address tough policy decisions<\/a> as part of the budget process, opting instead to pass a simple plan that avoids the most partisan debates in the Capitol. They maintained Pennsylvania\u2019s structural deficit and did not approve any new revenue generators, using accounting tricks to avoid tapping<\/a> into the state\u2019s rainy day fund.<\/p>\n Christina Phillips, a retired Department of Health employee who organized the Child Death Review program, told Spotlight PA that the state needs to focus the limited resources that made it into the budget on two aspects of supporting counties: acquiring victims\u2019 difficult-to-obtain medical records, and synthesizing that information into usable data for prevention.<\/p>\n \u201cA review is only as good as the information that you have at the table,\u201d Phillips said.<\/p>\n Rosie Lapowsky, Shapiro\u2019s spokesperson, noted there previously was no funding available for the program, and the new money is \u201cthe result of compromise and reflects the reality of working with a divided government.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Governor will continue to make investments that keep Pennsylvania\u2019s children safe and looks forward to working with the General Assembly to further improve PA\u2019s child death review program,\u201d Lapowsky said in a statement.<\/p>\n Further changes to Child Death Review appear possible in the near future.<\/p>\n State Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R., Indiana) told Spotlight PA in a statement that looking closer at improving the program \u201cmakes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAny increases to the Department of Health to further support this program would require accountability that tax dollars are being used efficiently and effectively to better protect children,\u201d Pittman said.<\/p>\n State House Majority Leader Matt Bradford (D., Montgomery) did not respond to a request for comment on Child Death Review.<\/p>\n Policymakers have known about the program\u2019s shortcomings since at least 2024, when an East Stroudsburg University evaluation<\/a> deemed the program \u201can unfunded mandate\u201d for counties because there is little-to-no state-level support. The Department of Health commissioned that study after Phillips said she raised concerns about the program to her supervisors.<\/p>\n East Stroudsburg researchers identified 20 rural counties that should at least consider organizing under regional offices to maximize their resources, and 22 counties \u2014 6 urban and 16 rural \u2014 that must regroup because although they experienced \u201csufficient deaths to justify a local team,\u201d they saw inconsistent participation from members.<\/p>\n Only 15 counties\u2019 teams were found to be \u201cstrong\u201d in their current form.<\/p>\n While You\u2019re Here<\/p>\n Spotlight PA\u2019s nonprofit reporting is a free public service, but it depends on your support. Give now to ensure it can continue.<\/p>\n The new funding for Child Death Review is the only increase included under the total $5.2 million for the Department of Health\u2019s Health Promotion and Disease Prevention line item, according to the agency. Currently, one full-time position \u2014 vacant, but with a new candidate beginning on Aug. 10 \u2014 is funded using federal grant money to review sudden unexpected infant deaths, while the department says there are three part-time staff members assigned to aid data support and management of the death review program.<\/p>\n The Department of Health did not answer a question about how many employees, if any, it plans to hire with the new funding.<\/p>\n Pennsylvania lawmakers created the Child Death Review mandate in 2008<\/a>, one of several policies<\/a> it adopted in the wake of the murder of Berks County toddler Maxwell Fisher in 1996. Another was Act 33 of 2008, which requires county-level investigations when a child younger than 18 dies or nearly dies due to suspected abuse or neglect.<\/p>\n Palm has also criticized Act 33\u2019s effectiveness<\/a> and the lack of transparency she says she\u2019s seen from local teams, and argues that the two related laws \u201cdon\u2019t have good interplay between them.\u201d She said she would like to see lawmakers take a comprehensive look at the state\u2019s entire approach to preventing child deaths that combines Child Death Review, Act 33, and other related prevention efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just feels like we’re at a moment where we need to take a step back and be like, \u2018What is it we want to do as it relates to when children die? What do we want to do in response to those deaths in terms of learning from them and working to prevent them?\u2019\u201d Palm said.<\/p>\n BEFORE YOU GO\u2026 If you learned something from this article, pay it forward and contribute to Spotlight PA at spotlightpa.org\/donate. This story was funded in part thanks to the support of the Lancaster County Local Journalism Fund. Learn more about how we are supported here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HARRISBURG \u2014 The Pennsylvania Department of Health received $242,000 in this year\u2019s budget to help county teams review…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":251695,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-251694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/251695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}