Strengthening Vital Statistics Systems

Overview

Access to timely evidence-based information on trends in diseases, injuries and risk factors, and on the performance of the health system, is crucial for policy-makers everywhere to make complex choices and decisions. They need health information systems (HIS) that can provide answers and needed information.

Civil registration and the vital statistics (CRVS) that flows from it are often referred to as the “cornerstone” of a national HIS. Vital events, and the characteristics collected on these, are key inputs for health planning, policy-making and disease prevention. However, more than half of the 38 countries that make up the WHO South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions cannot count on their CRVS systems to deliver the data they require for planning their health systems and maximizing health outcomes for their populations.

In these countries, HIS are unable to respond to demands for data to inform policy and research. Even the most fundamental information on the annual number, age, and sex of people who die is missing in many countries, and even fewer have data on what they died from. The reason for this lack of basic data is that many low and middle-income countries do not have adequate CRVS systems that cover the entire population, register and certify all births and deaths, and consolidate this information into vital statistics. Moreover, since the large majority of people in these countries do not die in hospitals but in the community, many deaths, even if registered, do not have a medically certified cause, thus limiting their value for public policy.

In the Asia Pacific region, only a handful of countries have vital statistics systems that can be classified as either satisfactory or well-functioning. The remainder falls into one of the three weaker categories or have no vital statistics data at all. Of the five global regions, only countries in the African region seem to be doing worse than those in the Asia Pacific region. Typically, the countries in the two weaker categories are also those with the poorest health profiles and the weakest HIS, yet they have the greatest need for reliable data to stimulate and focus policies to help accelerate health development.

The Policy Brief has looked into different systems that produce data on causes of death and laid out some options and potential strategies that countries might follow to rapidly and cost-effectively improve the cause of death information that these systems produce. This in turn would greatly benefit national health planning and increase critical knowledge about disease burden in the region as well as provide accurate information about how it is changing.