Determination of Causes of Deaths by Verbal Autopsy (VA)
S. M. Raihan Gafur, Md. Toufiq Hassan Shawon
CRVS: Civil Registration and Vital Statistics are governmental solutions to declare and record citizens’ vital statistics in a centralized database. CRVS stands on six fundamental pillars: i. Birth, i. Adoption, iii. Marriage, iv. Divorce, v. Death, vi. Cause of Death.
Verbal Autopsy: Cause of Death is one of the fundamental pillars of CRVS. It has been seen that 20% of deaths in our country happen in the hospitals, which leads it to MCCOD, but the remaining 80% of the deaths are at the community level. That’s why we cannot get the death records and the reasons for the deaths. For this reason, we have surveyed with a questionnaire form to collect the data and analyze it to find out the causes of deaths at this community level.
In this survey research project, we have made a questionnaire (which has been made with the help of the University of Melbourne) form with Open Data Kit (ODK) tool and surveyed at the community level to get information on the health condition, habits, and diseases of the dead person by asking the questions to the caregiver of his/her last days. After getting all the information, we have analyzed the data with a smartVA analyzer, which the University of Melbourne has developed, and another tool named VIPER.