Abstract

ProblemBangladesh has no national system for registering deaths and determining their causes. As a result, policy-makers lack reliable and complete data to inform public health decisions.ApproachIn 2016, the government of Bangladesh introduced a pilot project to strengthen the civil registration and vital statistics system and generate cause of death data in Kaliganj Upazila. Community-based health workers were trained to notify births and deaths to the civil registrar, and to conduct verbal autopsy interviews with family members of a deceased person. International experts in cause-of-death certification and coding trained master trainers on how to complete the international medical certificate of cause of death. These trainers then trained physicians and coders.Local settingKaliganj Upazila has an estimated population of 304 600, and 5600 births and 1550 deaths annually. Health assistants and family welfare assistants make regular visits to households to track certain health outcomes.Relevant changesFollowing the start of the project in 2016, the number of births registered within 45 days rose from 873 to 4630 in 2018. The number of deaths registered within 45 days increased from 458 to 1404. During this period, health assistants conducted 7837 verbal autopsy interviews. Between January 2017 and December 2018, 105 master trainers and more than 7000 physicians were trained to complete the international medical certificate of cause of death and they completed more than 12 000 certificates.Lessons learntTraining community-based health workers, physicians and coders were successful approaches to improve death registration completeness and availability of cause-of-death data.

Highlights

  • In 2018, Bangladesh had a population of approximately 165 million, of these around 104 million (63%) people were living in rural areas and about 48 million (29%) people were younger than 14 years of age.[1]

  • Since ICD statistical coding is a new area of work in Bangladesh, the coding is being introduced through World Health Organization (WHO)’s Start-up Mortality List.[11]

  • The use of health assistants and family welfare assistants as notification agents has led to significant increases in birth and death registration and generated data on deaths by age, sex and causes in settings where most deaths occur at home without medical supervision

Read more

Summary

Lessons froLmessontshfroem field the field

Moyeen Uddin,a Shah Ali Akbar Ashrafi,a Abul Kalam Azad,b Anir Chowdhury,c Hafizur Rahman Chowdhury,d Ian Douglas Riley,d Andres Montes,e Martin Bratschi,e Carla AbouZahrf & Zeaul Alamg. Community-based health workers were trained to notify births and deaths to the civil registrar, and to conduct verbal autopsy interviews with family members of a deceased person. International experts in cause-of-death certification and coding trained master trainers on how to complete the international medical certificate of cause of death. The number of deaths registered within 45 days increased from 458 to 1404 During this period, health assistants conducted 7837 verbal autopsy interviews. Lessons learnt Training community-based health workers, physicians and coders were successful approaches to improve death registration completeness and availability of cause-of-death data

Introduction
Death occurs at home in the community
Relevant changes
Findings
Lessons learnt
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call