The Ghana Statistical Services (GSS) has called for accurate, timely and vital statistics on road traffic, Violent and External Deaths in Accra to avert threats to identify data stock and its usage.
At Ghana Mortality Statistics Project, a dissemination workshop, the Service says there is an urgent need to “ensure the registration and generation of accurate, comprehensive and timely vital statistics on road traffic, violent and external deaths”.
As part of efforts to address these challenges, the Ghana Statistical Service and its partners with funding support from the Bloomberg Philanthropies implemented the Ghana Mortality Statistics Project under the Data for Health Initiative (D4H) Global Grants Project to among other things establish a system of routine data collection for road traffic, violent and external deaths.
A pilot survey collected data from 38 police stations/divisions/commands in the Accra and Tema areas. Data on a total of 509 cases were collected between January and December 2020.
The findings indicate that about 7% of the deaths were due to road traffic accidents while homicides and suicides constituted 3.1% and 0.6% respectively.
However, 61.3% of the reported cases of death were designated as undetermined and required coroner investigation.
Further analysis, however, revealed that autopsy investigations were not conducted for about 47% of the reported cases.
Additionally, more than half of these deaths were not registered with the Births and Deaths Registry.
A functional civil registration and vital system is essential for health policy and planning and also provides benchmark data for establishing national identity systems and other governance services that are essential for national development. Yet, in many African countries, national civil registration systems are not fully functional and the vital statistics generated are not of acceptable international standards.
Ghana’s civil registration system suffers a number of limitations especially in the area of death registration and generation of vital statistics including cause of death statistics. Analysis of the different sources of data on mortality in the country shows that mortality statistics are mainly from health facilities. Such data is however only a fraction of the deaths that occur in the country, as about seventy percent of all deaths occur outside health facilities. Additionally, data from road traffic, violent and external causes of death appear to be missing from the available sources of data on mortality.
Story by Edzorna Francis Mensah.
