Unifying the death notification form: Recommendations by the Saudi Health Council task force

Abstract

Objectives Death reporting and certification forms are essential elements of a country's healthcare policies. KSA faces several challenges regarding death reporting and certification. This study aims to provide recommendations to unify death notifications in Saudi Arabia. Methods In 2019, the General Secretariat of the Saudi Health Council designed a qualitative research project that aimed to provide recommendations to unify death notifications. The council convened a task force of physicians and healthcare administrators to design and conduct qualitative research to review the Saudi Health Council's policies related to death certification and investigate potential methods of improvement. In addition, the task force performed an extensive review of the literature and current practices in KSA. Results The task force proposed a set of robust recommendations to correct the issues affecting the current systems of death reporting and certification. Conclusions This report presents the working methodology and recommendations of the task force.

The association between taking a death certificate course and practical knowledge about death certificate among Saudi medical students

“…Difficulties may arise in special situations such as hypothermia and/or poisoning [10,15]. The practicing physician, who neither has sufficient training nor has ever performed a necropsy on a hypothermic or poisoned person, is objectively overtaxed in this situation [16,17]. All that needs to be established is the time at which the deceased was last seen alive and the time at which the deceased was found dead.…”

Population health data in KSA: Status, challenges, and opportunities

“…Moreover, death registration is another essential aspect that can help policymakers assess and monitor the overall disease burden, and the specific and leading causes of mortality. 22 While death data is recorded for all citizens and residents in the Kingdom through the National Information Center (NIC), 23 it is not routinely linked to the other databases or registries as in other developed countries. More work is needed to make this data available to researchers and confidentially linked with national disease registries.…”

Community perception of causes of death using verbal autopsy for diabetes mellitus in Saudi Arabia

“…In the local context, Prior studies in Saudi Arabia have identified gaps in mortality data [29][30][31][32], particularly in causes of death recording and reporting. Saudi Arabia encounters significant challenges in the realm of death reporting, marked by divergent death certification practices across health service sectors in the absence of a standardized electronic reporting system [29].…”

“…In the local context, Prior studies in Saudi Arabia have identified gaps in mortality data [29][30][31][32], particularly in causes of death recording and reporting. Saudi Arabia encounters significant challenges in the realm of death reporting, marked by divergent death certification practices across health service sectors in the absence of a standardized electronic reporting system [29]. Due to emergencies, administrative or cultural factors, it is often that ICDs are inconsistently assigned to medical certifications, which poses civil registration and vital statistics quality and completeness implications, according to more recent reports [29][30][31].…”

“…Saudi Arabia encounters significant challenges in the realm of death reporting, marked by divergent death certification practices across health service sectors in the absence of a standardized electronic reporting system [29]. Due to emergencies, administrative or cultural factors, it is often that ICDs are inconsistently assigned to medical certifications, which poses civil registration and vital statistics quality and completeness implications, according to more recent reports [29][30][31]. While the literature on Saudi civil registration and vital statistics and the estimated gaps of causes of death information is scarce, a recent study conducted during the first half of 2020 to examine demographic characteristics, patterns, determinants, and primary causes of death revealed a gap of around 20% of causes of deaths data [31].…”