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The Accuracy of Mortality Reporting in Displaced Persons Camps During the Post‐emergency Phase
Author(s) -
Spiegel Paul B.,
Sheik Mani,
Woodruff Bradley A.,
Burnham Gilbert
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
disasters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.744
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1467-7717
pISSN - 0361-3666
DOI - 10.1111/1467-7717.00169
Subject(s) - medicine , occupational safety and health , injury prevention , suicide prevention , medical emergency , poison control , mortality rate , environmental health , under reporting , human factors and ergonomics , demography , surgery , pathology , sociology , statistics , mathematics
For humanitarian organisations, accurate data are essential to identify emerging health problems and determine programme needs. We visited 45 post‐emergency phase displaced persons camps and collected three months' mortality data which we compared with organisations' routine mortality reports. Organisations reported 612 deaths and we identified 741 deaths, for a mortality‐reporting ratio, defined as the number of organisation‐reported deaths divided by the number of investigator‐identified deaths, of 83 per cent. For the majority of camps which under‐reported deaths, mortality reporting ratios were significantly higher for women than men, and for camps with central mortality registers rather than those without. In the few camps which over‐reported deaths, these occurred primarily among children younger than five years of age, probably due to the inclusion of abortions and stillbirths. Despite the overall under‐reporting of deaths by humanitarian organisations, the existing health information systems appear to estimate mortality rates adequately in these post‐emergency camps. However, organisations should improve the precision and completeness with which they report the characteristics of deaths in order to provide valuable data to target their programmes at the most vulnerable people.