Improving Child survival and development is one of the key goals of National Health Mission (NHM). It is recognized that most child deaths occurring across the country are preventable.

An operational guideline has been developed by Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for strengthening the mechanism of Child Death Review. It is envisaged that through Child Death Review (CDR) process all child deaths are reported and accounted for and the causes of death are investigated for corrective action. The CDR follows systematic process of notification, investigation, assigning the cause and reporting of the cases. The process has to be done both at the community level as well as at the designated facilities of the state.

For the state of Bihar, Child Death Review Process was initiated in August 2015 and implemented across the state through capacity building of the stakeholders, notification of the CDR committees, identification of the facilities for facility based CDR process, identification of the nodal officers for the process, holding of the review meetings at various level, printing of the reporting formats and CDR formats.

NIPI supported the State Health Society, Bihar and State Child Health Division to conduct a review meeting on 29^th Jan 2021 at the state level under the leadership of Executive Director NHM Mr. Manoj Kumar. The meeting was attended by SPO Child health, Assistant Director- Child Health and Nutrition, District Nodal Officers for CDR, NHM Consultants, Faculty members of Medical colleges of the state and Development Partners like NIPI, UNICEF and CARE.

The purpose of the meeting was to conduct a programmatic review of the program and a reorientation on the concepts of Clinical Data Repository (CDR). NIPI was instrumental in supporting the meeting through finalization of the agenda, preparation of Concept of CDR process and providing logistic support for the reorientation. Review & reorientation was conducted through Zoom platform. The progress of the CDR implementation at the district and Block level, issues of the Reporting of CDR, concept of CDR and Various Reporting formats, status of the expenditures of CDR, way forward for improvement of the program implementation were discussed with all the 38 district health officials.

The districts were asked to improve the reporting status of the program, to expedite the expenditure of the program and to hold meetings at various levels on a regular basis. It was decided to arrange monthly state level Child Death review meeting.