CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) – West Virginia lawmakers rely on the state’s Fatality and Mortality Review Team’s annual report to help set policy in hopes of preventing future deaths involving infants, children, pregnant mothers and domestic violence victims.
That information is so crucial that lawmakers in March passed a new law mandating that each year’s report, due by Dec. 1, include the previous year’s data.
In this instance, that was 2023.
Yet, when the report was presented last week, the year 2023 did not even appear on the front cover — a void spurring this response from the legislation’s lead sponsor, Del. Amy Summers, R-Summers.
“This doesn’t cover what we asked you to cover in the legislation,” she told last week’s presenter. “The 2024 report would review all of 2023. This includes nothing of ’23. This is 2019, 2020, 2021.”
“What you see in this report is the cases that were reviewed in the previous year,” responded Amy Atkins, deputy commissioner for the West Virginia Bureau for Public Health.
Atkins explained investigations, autopsies and other procedures that help determine one’s cause of death can take time and delay reporting.
But lawmakers say time is of the essence in adopting policy to prevent future deaths.
That includes infants who die because of an unsafe sleeping environment, children who die in motor vehicle crashes and pregnant women whose mental health issues contribute to their death — all issues highlighted in the report, but based upon data dating back years.
“We don’t feel like we can make legislative changes, if we’re seeing a trend in something — in a timely fashion — if we’re seeing a trend of something occurring years and years later,” Summers told presenters.
Sen. Vince Deeds, R-Greenbrier, had similar thoughts.
“How can we educate those families and prevent SIDs, for instance, if we can’t get this information back to the families in a timely manner,” he said.
Deeds suggested incomplete or pending data would be better than no data at all. That idea won praise from Summers and the state’s chief medical examiner.
Atkins says her team plans to release a series of smaller reports beginning with one on infant mortality and sleeping deaths. She said that would be delivered by Feb. 1, 2025, in time for next year’s legislative session.
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