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How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data

BACKGROUND: The registration and certification of births has a wide array of individual and societal benefits. While near-universal in some parts of the world, birth registration is less common in many low- and middle-income countries, and the quality of vital statistics vary. We assembled publicly...

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Autores principales: Phillips, David E., Adair, Tim, Lopez, Alan D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6307230/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30587201
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12963-018-0180-6
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author Phillips, David E.
Adair, Tim
Lopez, Alan D.
author_facet Phillips, David E.
Adair, Tim
Lopez, Alan D.
author_sort Phillips, David E.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The registration and certification of births has a wide array of individual and societal benefits. While near-universal in some parts of the world, birth registration is less common in many low- and middle-income countries, and the quality of vital statistics vary. We assembled publicly available birth registration records for as many countries as possible into a novel global birth registration database, and we present a systematic assessment of available data. METHODS: We obtained 4918 country-years of data from 145 countries covering the period 1948–2015. We compared these to existing estimates of total births to assess completeness of public data and adapted existing methods to evaluate the quality and timeliness of the data. RESULTS: Since 1980, approximately one billion births were registered and shared in public databases. Compared to estimates of fertility, this represents only 40.0% of total births in the peak year, 2011. Approximately 74 million births (53.1%) per year occur in countries whose systems do not systematically register them and release the aggregate records. Considering data quality, timeliness, and completeness in country-years where data are available, only about 12 million births per year (8.6%) occur in countries with high-performing registration systems. CONCLUSIONS: This analysis highlights the gaps in available data. Our objective and low-cost approach to assessing the performance of birth registration systems can be helpful to monitor country progress, and to help national and international policymakers set targets for strengthening birth registration systems. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12963-018-0180-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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spelling pubmed-63072302019-01-02 How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data Phillips, David E. Adair, Tim Lopez, Alan D. Popul Health Metr Research BACKGROUND: The registration and certification of births has a wide array of individual and societal benefits. While near-universal in some parts of the world, birth registration is less common in many low- and middle-income countries, and the quality of vital statistics vary. We assembled publicly available birth registration records for as many countries as possible into a novel global birth registration database, and we present a systematic assessment of available data. METHODS: We obtained 4918 country-years of data from 145 countries covering the period 1948–2015. We compared these to existing estimates of total births to assess completeness of public data and adapted existing methods to evaluate the quality and timeliness of the data. RESULTS: Since 1980, approximately one billion births were registered and shared in public databases. Compared to estimates of fertility, this represents only 40.0% of total births in the peak year, 2011. Approximately 74 million births (53.1%) per year occur in countries whose systems do not systematically register them and release the aggregate records. Considering data quality, timeliness, and completeness in country-years where data are available, only about 12 million births per year (8.6%) occur in countries with high-performing registration systems. CONCLUSIONS: This analysis highlights the gaps in available data. Our objective and low-cost approach to assessing the performance of birth registration systems can be helpful to monitor country progress, and to help national and international policymakers set targets for strengthening birth registration systems. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12963-018-0180-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2018-12-27 /pmc/articles/PMC6307230/ /pubmed/30587201 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12963-018-0180-6 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research
Phillips, David E.
Adair, Tim
Lopez, Alan D.
How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data
title How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data
title_full How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data
title_fullStr How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data
title_full_unstemmed How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data
title_short How useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? A global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data
title_sort how useful are registered birth statistics for health and social policy? a global systematic assessment of the availability and quality of birth registration data
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6307230/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30587201
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12963-018-0180-6
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