Completeness and Quality of the Maputo Mortuary Dataset

Authors: Kavi Bhalla, Jerry P Abraham and Kidist Bartolomeos

Date: September 14, 2010

Objective: To do a crude test of the completeness and quality of the Maputo Central Hospital Mortuary dataset

Method: The number of deaths in the mortuary records was compared with an estimate of the number of deaths expected in the Maputo metropolitan area

Findings:

- The quality of cause of death attribution of the dataset is high with a relatively small number of deaths assigned to unspecified causes.

- Results suggest that the number of deaths recorded in the mortuary exceeds the expected number of injury deaths in the city. Further investigations are necessary.

Background

- Data Source: Maputo Central Hospital Mortuary Records. The dataset contained records for ten years, 1994-2003. Only data from the year 2003 was used in this completeness test.

- Note that the database was retrospectively constructed from existing mortuary records.

- This mortuary database only contains predominantly injury cases. Out of the total 12,354 deaths in the database from 1994-2003, only 5% are from non-injury causes (listed as “natural” deaths).

Assessment of Quality of Injury Coding (see Table 1)

· See Table 1 for distribution of injury deaths

· The quality of cause of death attribution in the dataset is high with relatively few cases assigned to partially-specified cause categories.

o Overall intent is unknown for 13% of deaths. However, even within this category, the mechanism is known for 62% of the cases.

o The unknown mechanism category within the unintentional, self-inflicted and inter-personal categories is negligibly small.

· However, note that sub-categories (i.e. road users) of road injury are not available.

Table 1: External cause distribution of deaths in the Maputo Mortuary Dataset