Assessing the Diagnostic Accuracy of Physicians for Home Death Certification in Shanghai: Application of SmartVA.

Approximately 30% of deaths in Shanghai either occur at home or are not medically attended. The recorded cause of death (COD) in these cases may not be reliable. We applied the Smart Verbal Autopsy (VA) tool to assign the COD for a representative sample of home deaths certified by 16 community health centers (CHCs) from three districts in Shanghai, from December 2017 to June 2018.

Validation of physician certified verbal autopsy using conventional autopsy: a large study of adult non-external causes of death in a metropolitan area in Brazil.

Background: Reliable mortality data are essential for the development of public health policies. In Brazil, although there is a well-consolidated universal system for mortality data, the quality of information on causes of death (CoD) is not even among Brazilian regions, with a high proportion of ill-defined CoD. Verbal autopsy (VA) is an alternative to improve mortality data.

How advanced is the epidemiological transition in Papua New Guinea? New evidence from verbal autopsy.

Background: Reliable cause of death (COD) data are not available for the majority of deaths in Papua New Guinea (PNG), despite their critical policy value. Automated verbal autopsy (VA) methods, involving an interview and automated analysis to diagnose causes of community deaths, have recently been trialled in PNG. Here, we report VA results from three sites and highlight the utility of these methods to generate information about the leading CODs in the country.

Generating cause of death information to inform health policy: implementation of an automated verbal autopsy system in the Solomon Islands.

Background: Good quality cause of death (COD) information is fundamental for formulating and evaluating public health policy; yet most deaths in developing countries, including the Solomon Islands, occur at home without medical certification of cause of death (MCCOD). As a result, COD data in such contexts are often of limited use for policy and planning. Verbal autopsies (VAs) are a cost-effective way of generating reliable COD information in populations lacking comprehensive MCCOD coverage, but this method has not previously been applied in the Solomon Islands.

The impact of errors in medical certification on the accuracy of the underlying cause of death.

Background: Correct certification of cause of death by physicians (i.e. completing the medical certificate of cause of death or MCCOD) and correct coding according to International Classification of Diseases (ICD) rules are essential to produce quality mortality statistics to inform health policy.

Validation of SmartVA using conventional autopsy: A study of adult deaths in Brazil.

Background: Accurate cause of death data are essential to guide health policy. However, mortality surveillance is limited in many low-income countries. In such settings, verbal autopsy (VA) is increasingly used to provide population-level cause of death data.

Diversity of epidemiological transition in the Pacific: Findings from the application of verbal autopsy in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

Background: Cause of death data are essential for rational health planning yet are not routinely available in Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Solomon Islands. Indirect estimation of cause of death patterns suggests these populations are epidemiologically similar, but such assessments are not based on direct evidence.

Methods: Verbal autopsy (VA) interviews were conducted at three sites in PNG and nationwide in Solomon Islands.

Improving the Policy Utility of Cause of Death Statistics in Sri Lanka: An Empirical Investigation of Causes of Out-of-Hospital Deaths Using Automated Verbal Autopsy Methods.

Setting public health policies and effectively monitoring the impact of health interventions requires accurate, timely and complete cause of death (CoD) data for populations. In Sri Lanka, almost half of all deaths occur outside hospitals, with questionable diagnostic accuracy, thus limiting their information content for policy. To ascertain whether SmartVA is applicable in improving the specificity of cause of death data for out-of-hospital deaths in Sri Lanka, and hence enhance the value of these routinely collected data for informing public policy debates.

Estimating causes of out-of-hospital deaths in China: application of SmartVA methods.

Background: Most deaths in China occur at home, making it difficult to collect reliable cause of death (CoD) information. Verbal autopsy (VA) was applied using the SmartVA tool to a sample of home deaths in China to explore its feasibility as a means of improving the quality of CoD data.

Methods: The study was carried out in 22 districts in 9 provinces, located in north-east, central, and western areas of China during 2017 and 2018.

Mortality surveillance and verbal autopsy strategies: experiences, challenges and lessons learnt in Papua New Guinea.

Full notification of deaths and compilation of good quality cause of death data are core, sequential and essential components of a functional civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) system. In collaboration with the Government of Papua New Guinea (PNG), trial mortality surveillance activities were established at sites in Alotau District in Milne Bay Province, Tambul-Nebilyer District in Western Highlands Province and Talasea District in West New Britain Province.Provincial Health Authorities trialled strategies to improve completeness of death notification and implement an automated verbal autopsy methodology, including use of different notification agents and paper or mobile phone methods.

Reducing ignorance about who dies of what: research and innovation to strengthen CRVS systems.

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda offers a major impetus to consolidate and accelerate development in civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems. Strengthening CRVS systems is an SDG outcome in itself. Moreover, CRVS systems are the best - if not essential - source of data to monitor and guide health policy debates and to assess progress towards numerous SDG targets and indicators.

Addressing critical knowledge and capacity gaps to sustain CRVS system development.

Background: Improving civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems requires strengthening the capacity of the CRVS workforce. The improvement of data collection and diagnostic practices must be accompanied by efforts to ensure that the workforce has the skills and knowledge to assess the quality of, and analyse, CRVS data using demographic and epidemiological techniques. While longer-term measures to improve data collection practices must continue to be implemented, it is important to build capacity in the cautious use of imperfect data.

Improving medical certification of cause of death: effective strategies and approaches based on experiences from the Data for Health Initiative.

Background: Accurate and timely cause of death (COD) data are essential for informed public health policymaking. Medical certification of COD generally provides the majority of COD data in a population and is an essential component of civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems. Accurate completion of the medical certificate of cause of death (MCCOD) should be a relatively straightforward procedure for physicians, but mistakes are common.

Consent to data linkage in a large online epidemiological survey of 18-23 year old Australian women in 2012-13.

Background: Consent to link survey data with health-related administrative datasets is increasingly being sought but little is known about the influence of recruiting via online technologies on participants' consents. The goal of this paper is to examine what factors (sociodemographic, recruitment, incentives, data linkage information, health) are associated with opt-in consent to link online survey data to administrative datasets (referred to as consent to data linkage).

Methods: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health is a prospective study of factors affecting the health and well-being of women.

Hierarchical contributions of linguistic knowledge to talker identification: Phonological versus lexical familiarity.

Listeners identify talkers more accurately when listening to their native language compared to an unfamiliar, foreign language. This language-familiarity effect in talker identification has been shown to arise from familiarity with both the sound patterns (phonetics and phonology) and the linguistic content (words) of one's native language. However, it has been unknown whether these two sources of information contribute independently to talker identification abilities, particularly whether hearing familiar words can facilitate talker identification in the absence of familiar phonetics.

"Everybody Knows Everybody Else's Business"-Privacy in Rural Communities.

Patients have a right to privacy in a health care setting. This involves conversational discretion, security of medical records and physical privacy of remaining unnoticed or unidentified when using health care services other than by those who need to know or whom the patient wishes to know. However, the privacy of cancer patients who live in rural areas is more difficult to protect due to the characteristics of rural communities.

Inequalities in long term health-related quality of life between partnered and not partnered breast cancer survivors through the mediation effect of social support.

Objective: To compare long-term quality of life outcomes by marital status among women living with breast cancer, and to test the mediation effects of social support as an underlying factor.

Methods: Data are drawn from 1996 to 2010 of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health. The sample included 505 women with breast cancer with six years of follow-up data.

Moderating effects of social engagement on driving cessation in older women.

Background: Driving cessation in later life is associated with depression. This study examines if social support can buffer the negative effects of driving cessation on older women's mental health.

Methods: Participants were drawn from the 1921-1926 cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (ALSWH) and included 4,075 older women (aged 76-87 years) who drove at baseline, following them for three years to assess driving cessation.

Screening mammography uptake within Australia and Scotland in rural and urban populations.

Objective: To test the hypothesis that rural populations had lower uptake of screening mammography than urban populations in the Scottish and Australian setting.

Method: Scottish data are based upon information from the Scottish Breast Screening Programme Information System describing uptake among women residing within the NHS Highland Health Board area who were invited to attend for screening during the 2008 to 2010 round (N = 27,416). Australian data were drawn from the 2010 survey of the 1946-51 cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (N = 9890 women).

Rural-urban disparities in stage of breast cancer at diagnosis in Australian women.

Objective: To examine urban-rural differences and individual risk factors for a late stage of breast cancer at diagnosis in Australian women.

Design: Individual-level longitudinal data were linked with cancer registry data from New South Wales (New South Wales Cancer Registry linked by the Centre for Health Record Linkage (CHeReL)), Queensland (Queensland Cancer Registry) and Victoria (The Cancer Council Victoria).

Setting: Participants were drawn from the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health 1946-1951 cohort (n = 13 715).

A systematic review of the effects of euthanasia and occupational stress in personnel working with animals in animal shelters, veterinary clinics, and biomedical research facilities.

Background: The study of occupational stress and compassion fatigue in personnel working in animal-related occupations has gained momentum over the last decade. However, there remains incongruence in understanding what is currently termed compassion fatigue and the associated unique contributory factors. Furthermore, there is minimal established evidence of the likely influence of these conditions on the health and well-being of individuals working in various animal-related occupations.

Psychological distress, optimism and general health in breast cancer survivors: a data linkage study using the Scottish Health Survey.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to examine the association between optimism and psychological distress in women with breast cancer after taking into account their self-rated general health.

Methods: Data were aggregated from the Scottish Health Survey (2008 to 2011) to derive a nationally representative sample of 12,255 women (11,960 cancer-free controls, and 295 breast cancer cases identified from linked cancer registry data). The explanatory variables were optimism and general health, and the outcome variable was symptoms of psychological distress.