Counting the dead and what they died from: an assessment of the global status of cause of death data.

TLDR

The study aimed to evaluate the global status of death registration data and assess indicators of completeness and quality. The authors compiled death registration data from 115 countries, evaluated timeliness, completeness, coverage, and ill‑defined cause proportions, and identified 64 countries with essentially complete records. Coverage ranges from nearly 100 % in Europe to under 10 % in Africa, with only 23 countries achieving >90 % completeness and 28 countries falling below 70 % completeness or exceeding 20 % ill‑defined causes, underscoring a critical need for improved death registration worldwide.

Abstract

We sought to assess the current status of global data on death registration and to examine several indicators of data completeness and quality.We summarized the availability of death registration data by year and country. Indicators of data quality were assessed for each country and included the timeliness, completeness and coverage of registration and the proportion of deaths assigned to ill-defined causes.At the end of 2003 data on death registration were available from 115 countries, although they were essentially complete for only 64 countries. Coverage of death registration varies from close to 100% in the WHO European Region to less than 10% in the African Region. Only 23 countries have data that are more than 90% complete, where ill-defined causes account for less than 10% of total of causes of death, and where ICD-9 or ICD-10 codes are used. There are 28 countries where less than 70% of the data are complete or where ill-defined codes are assigned to more than 20% of deaths. Twelve high-income countries in western Europe are included among the 55 countries with intermediate-quality data.Few countries have good-quality data on mortality that can be used to adequately support policy development and implementation. There is an urgent need for countries to implement death registration systems, even if only through sample registration, or enhance their existing systems in order to rapidly improve knowledge about the most basic of health statistics: who dies from what?