b. Health Research -Monitor trends in mortality and diseases
Users of mortality statistics include
Clinicians
Community health physicians
Epidemiologists
Social scientists
Biostatisticians/Demographers/ Medical records personnel
Programme managers
Policy-makers
Reporting of Cause of death
Only about 1 in 5 deaths in India have a cause of death identified for them
Sources of CoD data
CoD data is obtained through -
Civil Registration systems (CRS)
Sample Registration systems (SRS)
Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD)
1. Civil Registration systems (CRS)
It is a passive system comprising of registration of all births and deaths by the government
Data is collected by non-medical personnel
Aim: mainly for statistical purposes by registering the fact of death (and not the cause of death)
Status report in India –
Sample is incomplete and non-representative since only ~5.5 out of 10 lakh estimated deaths are reported per year
2. Sample Registration systems (SRS)
This is a subset of CRS wherein from ~7500 small representative geographic areas of the country the fact of death and the cause of death data are collected for a sample size of ~0.5 lakhs/year
It comprises of enumeration of deaths in sample villages / urban areas
It includes investigation of causes of mortality through verbal autopsy by trained non-medical personnel
Aim: for statistical purposes to assign a cause-of-death
Status report in India –
This system generates reliable community-based information on death rates as well as the causes of death by age-and-sex groups for the country as a whole and for different regions of India
3. Medical Certification of Cause of Death (MCCD)
This is hospital-based certification of deaths by physicians
Aim: It is used both for patient-oriented quality improvement and for statistical purposes
Status report in India –
It is non-representative since only ~1.5 out of 10 lakh deaths are certified per year; suffers from incomplete and inaccurate reporting of causes of death in hospital certificates
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