Incompleteness of death registration in Ghana: The role of mortuaries in death registration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Accurate worldwide information on the levels and patterns of mortality (deaths) is essential for planning and monitoring global public-health initiatives. The gold standard method for collecting such information is death registration. In high-income countries, death registration is effectively 100% complete, but the situation in many developing countries is very different. In most African countries, for example, less than one-quarter of deaths are officially recorded. Methods: The study was done to find out how provision of mortuaries could help increase death registration coverage in Ghana from the current 25%. In a cross sectional survey of 20 districts (those with mortuaries and without), a structured questionnaire was administered to 204 relatives to seek their knowledge on deaths they registered in the year 2010; and 20 districts registrars of births and deaths to explore the problems associated with death registration. Results: According to the relatives, 59.8% of the registered deaths expired at home compared to 33.3% deaths occurring in the hospitals and the remaining 6.9% were coroner's cases. Again, among the relatives, 46.1% were not aware of death registration and let alone knowing why they should register a death of a relative. In all the 20 districts studied, 95% had no computer. Eighty five percent of the registrars had only secondary education. Seventy percent of the districts had just one employed staff and 15% of the districts had no employed staff. Conclusion: It was observed in the present study that, the districts with mortuaries registered more deaths as compared to the districts without mortuaries. It is therefore evident that death registration coverage will increase if mortuaries are provided in the districts. Public education should be intensified on the need to register deaths and the registry given the needed assistance to perform. A more holistic and durable programme should be put in place such as the keeping of community register for the entry of all deaths in every community (unit committee level).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.027 | 0.132 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".