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More than Numbers
Welcome to our eighth edition of More than Numbers.
The e-newsletter that keeps you up-to-date on what is happening in the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) arm of the
Bloomberg Philanthropies Data for Health Initiative (BD4H)
by the University of Melbourne (UoM).
Dear colleagues,
Firstly, we are pleased to report that in October Bloomberg Philanthropies announced that an additional US$120 million has been added in funding to expand the Data for Health (D4H) initiative over four years from April, 2019. This will allow an increasing in the number of countries included in the partnership from 20 to 25 - reaching over 1.5 billion people.
The Australian government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is continuing its partnership with D4H, investing US$11 million toward the total. This partnership has already had a significant impact on improving CRVS data globally and has had a special impact in the Pacific region, particularly in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands where the technical interventions being implemented by the University of Melbourne team are beginning to yield valuable data for policy.
We are making progress; more importantly, the countries which we are supporting are making progress towards better, more cost-effective and more sustainable CRVS data collection practices. I hope that you will enjoy reading about these achievements reported in this newsletter. We have continued to strengthen CRVS capacity across all countries with our highly-successful CRVS Fellows program; we are delighted to introduce you to our six new fellows in this Newsletter to give you a sense of the exciting and game-changing skills that they are acquiring under this program.
We also continue to generate evidence and knowledge to inform CRVS development strategies everywhere; these are included in our CRVS Knowledge Gateway and feature our latest resources, including a Summary Report from Phase 2 (April 2017 to March 2019).
I hope you enjoy reading how we are collectively changing CRVS systems and data worldwide; remember – better data leads to better decisions leads to better population health outcomes!
Best wishes,
Laureate Professor Alan Lopez AC, Director
Have comments or suggestions for future content?
Email us at crvs-info@unimelb.edu.au
The Data for Health Initiative is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Australian Government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)
In Myanmar we have seen training rolled out to 490 participants since August. The workshops covered; Medical Certificate of Cause of Death (MCCOD), ICD coding quality assessment and analysis of Verbal Autopsy (VA) data, Business Process Mapping and Monitoring and Evaluation. Find out more about these workshops by reading the article about Dr. Saman Gamage featured in this newsletter.
In Papua New Guinea (PNG) we presented at the 55th Medical Symposium where we put the spotlight on VA and discussed how it can help to understand the bigger picture of how cause of death patterns are changing in PNG.
In the Philippines we rolled out MCCOD and IRIS automated mortality coding training. The IRIS course was aimed at staff who needed refresher training, as well as those who had experience using IRIS but had no formal training.
The Solomon Islands held workshops to implement CRVS awareness and are currently implementing a new notification strategy. For details on how church and the government came together, read the article about the Solomon Islands featured in this newsletter.
We visited China for the evaluation of Phase 1 activities and attended Smart VA training workshops in Chongqing and Tibet – regions with high unrecorded deaths in the community.
In early October a new intake of fellows arrived in Melbourne. Over six weeks they focused on their chosen topics with support from UoM technical experts. To kick off the program the fellows attended the CRVS boot camp.
This course ran five days and gave the fellows an introduction to several topics, including: CRVS system architecture, notification and registration practices, completeness, certification of cause of death and coding, monitoring and evaluation, capacity building and tools, the CRVS Knowledge Gateway, report writing, ANACONDA concepts & practices, ANACONDA tutorial and an overview of VA.
Follow @UniMelbD4H on Twitter for profiles on our fellows and insights into their topics.
Dibakar Sharma is a Statistical Officer for the Health Directorate in Pokhara, Nepal. Dibakar also worked as a Demographer for the Department of National ID and Civil Registration.
Dr. May Thu Zaw is the Deputy Director for the Planning Division for the Department of Medical Service at the Ministry of Health and Sports in Myanmar.
Adauto Martins Soares Filho is a qualified Nurse, PhD student in Epidemiology and has worked for the Ministry of Health (Brasília, Brazil) since 2003.
Dr. Suresh Mehata is the Chief of the Monitoring and Evaluation section for the Policy, Planning & Monitoring Division at the Ministry of Health and Population in Nepal.
Md. Toufiq Shawon is a Government Medical Officer at the Trishal Upazilla Health Complex in Bangladesh.
Sofoora Kawsar Usman is the Assistant Director for the Health Information and research department at the Ministry of Health in the Maldives.
Meet Dr Saman Gamage, one of the Technical Advisers for the D4H initiative at the University of Melbourne.
Since July 2019, Saman has rolled out training to Myanmar, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
Read about the courses Saman delivered and why they are at the heart of ensuring best practice CRVS processes are properly adopted.
Article here
Representatives from the churches of the Solomon Islands Christian Association (SICA) met with officials from the Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MHMS) and Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) for a workshop on improving death registration led by UoM D4H. All parties agreed to trial some approaches to boost community awareness about death notification and trial a burial notification form.
Article here
Want more information on CRVS? Our library is a good place to start.
You can take a look at all of our resources at: https://crvsgateway.info/library
Below are the latest resources that have been added to the Gateway.
The report covers the four keys areas the UoM D4H project worked across throughout Phase 2: Technical support and training, Research and development, CRVS Fellowship Program, and the CRVS Knowledge Gateway.
Applying country experiences and knowledge
• Fellowship Profile: SmartVA and ANACONDA improvement in China
• Fellowship Report: Evaluation of the ‘Kaliganj Model’ for proactive birth and death notification and registration
• End of Project Evaluation of Data for Health Initiative: Myanmar
• Quality assessment of fetal death data in the Brazilian Mortality Information System (Portuguese)
Improving death certification and mortality coding
• Course prospectus: ICD-10 mortality coder training (UPDATE)
Strengthening CRVS systems
• Strengthening health information systems in the Asia-Pacific region
Sent by:
The University of Melbourne Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative
Melbourne School of Population and Global Health
Parkville 3053, Victoria, Australia
ABN 84 002 705 224 | CRICOS Provider Number 00116K
