Abidjan – A total of 54 health providers, including doctors from public and private health establishments, have strengthened their capacities in the certification and codification of medical causes of death in Côte d’Ivoire, following a training seminar from Tuesday 20 to Friday 23 August 2024 in Abidjan-Cocody, at the initiative of the Ministry of Health, Public Hygiene and Universal Health Coverage.
This workshop, with the financial technical support of Vital Strategies, is part of a project called “Towards medical certification of causes of death in Côte d’Ivoire” and aims to strengthen the skills of health providers on death certification procedures and the specific criteria to follow according to the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) of the World Health Organization (WHO).
It also involves strengthening the skills of health data managers on death coding procedures and the specific criteria to follow according to this same classification and to correctly use ICD codes when coding causes of death as well as informing health providers of common errors in certification and coding causes of death and how to avoid them.
The deputy coordinator of the national mother-child health program, Ando Kouakou Hyacinthe, expressed that in the face of maternal deaths whose causes remain unknown, it is difficult to determine the appropriate actions to take to prevent them.
He said that attention was first focused on university hospitals, which recorded a large number of deaths. According to him, it is essential to know the exact cause of death and the circumstances in which it occurred, but he deplored the lack of available data in this regard.
The deputy coordinator explained that if the cause of death of a person can be determined and it turns out, for example, that accidents are the main cause, this would encourage the State to focus its actions on reducing the accident rate. He added that the next step will be to disseminate this knowledge nationally and implement it in the university hospitals, the CHRs of Abidjan, as well as in general hospitals.
In Côte d’Ivoire, there have been deficiencies in the certification of deaths. The death certificate in its current form is a permanent record of the facts and characteristics of the death but does not include information on the circumstances or causes of death.
Hence, the implementation of this project which is to raise awareness among selected doctors about the practices of medical certification of causes of death and international certification of diseases in terms of mortality coding for all deaths.
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