Completeness and Quality of Ibadan (Nigeria) Mortuary Dataset

Authors: Kavi Bhalla, Jerry P Abraham and Uwom Eze

Date: July 7, 2010

Objective: To do a crude test of the completeness and quality of the UCH-Ibadan mortuary dataset

Method: The number of deaths in the mortuary records was compared with an estimate of the number of deaths expected in the Ibadan 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.

- The completeness of the database is low (approximately 20%).

Background

- Data Source Analyzed: Ibadan University College Hospital (UCH) Mortuary Records. The dataset contained records for three years, 2007, 2008, and 2009. Only data from the most recent year (2009) was used in this completeness test.

- Analysis in this report should be repeated once better data on urban mortality in Nigeria is available:

o The analysis in this report uses crude estimates of population and mortality in Ibadan. Typically these have been extrapolated from estimates available for the country in international databases. Accurate data for population and mortality in urban Nigeria should be available from the Nigeria General Household Survey. This analysis should be updated when these estimates are available. (Note that the 2006 Census in Nigeria does not include any questions on household deaths)

- This mortuary database only contains injury cases. Note that the database was retrospectively constructed from the mortuary records. During this process, only causes for injury cases were determined and the remaining were coded as “Not Injury”. In 2009, 40% of the mortuary records were for injury cases. This is a very high fraction suggesting that the mortuary is more likely to receive injury cases.

Table 1: External cause distribution of deaths in the UCH-Ibadan Mortuary Dataset

Assessment of Quality of Injury Coding

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

o 7% of the road traffic deaths were not further specified.

o 1% of all injury cases were not further specified

Assessment of Completeness

· Coverage: The UCH mortuary receives cases from across Oyo state and from Southwest Nigeria but the majority of the cases are from Ibadan. However, in this analysis it is assumed that the mortuary receives cases only from Ibadan. Thus, the injury deaths in the UCH-mortuary are compared with total estimated injury deaths in the city.

· Age aggregation: The assessment focuses on deaths among young adults aged between 15-59 years in Ibadan. This was done to reduce uncertainty in this analysis. (Injuries occur primarily among young adults and the high mortality among children and older adults can add substantial uncertainty to analysis)

TABLE 2: Assessment of completeness of the UCH-Ibadan mortuary dataset (Year 2009)

This comparison suggests that the completeness of the mortuary dataset is low. We estimate that only approximately one-fifth of the injury deaths in Ibadan are in the UCH-Ibadan mortuary records.