Child physical abuse is a significant source of childhood morbidity and mortality, and preventable healthcare costs. Each year, in the US, more than 120,000 children are determined to have suffered physical abuse, resulting in hundreds of deaths and tens of thousands with long-term physical and psychological morbidity, with billions of dollars in healthcare costs and lost productivity. For decades, abuse research has had a dramatic deficit of resources and investigators. In 2013, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) report ?New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research? called for new, sophisticated, multidisciplinary research infrastructure ? specifically citing the need for additional multi-center research. The report also highlighted the need to create uniform definitions and measures that could link data across multiple professions, and to recruit a new cadre of capable investigators. Since the publication of the IOM's report, the child abuse pediatrics community has worked to lay the foundation for a sustainable research network for child abuse (CAPNET), and has succeeded in: establishing a network structure; ratifying governance documents; drafting pilot common data elements (CDEs); identifying an initial research agenda; and establishing an annual research training institute. This application proposes to leverage these accomplishments by creating sustainable data resources to launch CAPNET as a resource for the wider abuse research community. The resources created by this application will allow multi-center data collection, storage, quality assurance and sharing for abuse researchers across the career spectrum.
Our specific aims are:
Aim 1 : Refine, pilot and implement a web-based, multicenter data collection and quality assurance system for child abuse research. We will refine draft CDEs to ensure feasible, reliable data collection and cross-specialty data linkage. A data coordinating center will oversee data management, quality, and compliance, using a central IRB. These resources will produce a robust data, available to the wider research community, containing core clinical data from several thousand abuse evaluations from nine participating centers.
Aim 2 : Coordinate sharing and facilitate scholarly use of multi- center data. We will use data sharing agreements, in-person and distance meetings, pilot grants, innovative networking and mentorship and transparent performance metrics to nurture researchers across the career continuum.
Aim 3 : Begin expansion of CAPNET to include child welfare. We will use community engagement and consensus-building methods to develop the relationships needed, and to identify the priority research themes and data domains to address the next phase of collaborative medical and child welfare research. Each resource created by this application will benefit the wider research community, ultimately resulting in increased research capacity, decreased care disparities and improved outcomes for abused children.
Child physical abuse is the source of hundreds of thousands of injuries, hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in avoidable costs each year. This application will create data infrastructure to support a sustainable, multicenter research network dedicated to the care of physically abused children. By increasing research capacity related to physical abuse, these research resources will allow a new cadre of scientists to improve clinical care, decrease disparities and dramatically advance our understanding of child physical abuse.
