The participants after the opening session of the four-day workshop
Dr Owen Kaluwa, World Health Organisation (WHO) country representative for Ghana, has indicated the need for better birth and death statistics systems in order to detect impending health threats in real time.
He said such data was important to predict health status of the population to pave way for the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators.
“WHO’s technical strategy for improving mortality statistics, (2015 to 2020) highlights an immediate need to design better mortality statistics systems to ensure timely registration of deaths by sex, age and place of occurrence,” he pointed out.
He was addressing participants at the four-day Verbal Autopsy in Civil Registration and Vital Statistics System International Meeting in Accra.
The meeting which was organised by WHO Data for Health (D4H) and facilitated by the Ministry of Health (MoH) for health professionals in Africa and Asia was attended by 65 experts and academicians from 12 countries, including Ghana.
It will also propose ways of managing information on community deaths into an integrated health management information system
Dr Kaluwa stated that the WHO and other partners have put in place measures to support Ghana to document the cause of death information through integrated approaches at health facilities.
“We will continue to work hard to drive Ghana into a position of reaching regional excellence and achieve universal health coverage for all people,” he said.
In a speech read on behalf of Health Minister Kwaku Agyemang-Manu by the Director of Administration, Hamidu Adakurugu, he observed that millions of people in Africa and Asia are born and die without a trace on any legal records of their existence due to a stagnated registry system.
He said reliable information on the cause and number of deaths by age, sex and gender, is the cornerstone of an effective health information system and a national statistics system.
Mr Adakurugu stressed the need for countries to promote the development of standards to guide training and the integration of information of verbal causes of deaths for aid in national decision make processes.
Dr Gloria Quansah Asare, Deputy Director General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), in her address mentioned that Ghana has over the years initiated plans at strengthening its births and deaths registration.
She added that the Ministry of Health in April this year launched an improved facilitating technology for tracking deaths statistics in the country.
The District Health Information System (DHIMS2) dashboard, she said, is operational in all the 216 districts and is available in all health facilities.
She expressed the hope that the workshop would share best practices to equip stakeholders in improving deaths registration.
By Jamila Akweley Okertchiri