Developing standards in casualty recording: first meeting of a process

A process to develop standards in casualty recording practice has been started by Every Casualty, involving members of the International Practitioner Network (IPN) and users of casualty data. Standards have been demanded by practitioners, institutions that use the information they produce, and representatives of states and intergovernmental organisations.

The objective of the standards process is to define casualty recording as a recognised field, and provide a set of benchmarks to assess different initiatives to record casualties. The process will build on our research into casualty recording practice, and the experiences of the IPN.

First Meeting of a Process

In Bogota, Colombia at the end of February 2013, the first meeting of the process was held, with a workshop jointly hosted by IPN member CERAC and Oxford Research Group (ORG). Eight IPN members and three 'end-user' institutions were represented. We anticipate that the standards development process  will take 2-3 years, and involve consultation and input from a wide range of stakeholders, from casualty recording practitioners to states and intergovernmental organisations.

The Bogota workshop examined:

• The purpose of setting standards in casualty recording, both for practitioners and others such as end-users
• What standards should cover
• How casualty recording should be characterised as a field containing different approaches to documenting deaths
• How processes to develop standards in other fields, and different sources of standards, can help us
• Immediate and long term strategy for the development and adoption of standards in casualty recording

The workshop successfully achieved its objectives of:

• Establishing a core working group of practitioners and others committed to the standards development process
• Establishing priority areas of work for the next year, and
• Defining a process by which to achieve them.

We would like to thank all our participants for such a constructive discussion.

We will be consulting stakeholders to this process in the future on the work that was started in Bogota. If you would like to know more about the standards development process, please contact the Every Casualty team.