Publications by authors named "P Groenewald"
Background: Despite South Africa's well-established Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system (CRVS) and good completeness of death registration, challenges persist in terms of the quality of cause of death information and the delayed availability of mortality statistics. The introduction of an electronic medical certification of cause of death (eMCCD) system may offer opportunities to improve both the quality and timeliness of this information.
Methods: This study used an exploratory mixed methods design to investigate perceptions surrounding an electronic solution for registering deaths in South Africa.
Article Synopsis
- Verbal autopsy (VA) helps find out causes of death where birth and death records are not kept well, but it's costly. Telephonic VAs can save money. Sometimes, doctors need to agree on the cause, which can take a lot of time and effort.
- The study looked at how often two doctors agreed on the cause of death using telephonic VAs in South Africa, checking if their agreement was very high (over 0.8).
- Results showed that doctors agreed on causes like COVID-19 and heart disease most of the time, but not as much on diabetes. This means they might still need more than one doctor to be sure about the causes
Article Synopsis
- Verbal autopsy (VA) helps find out how people died when they weren't in a hospital, but it's hard to use it in official death records.
- In South Africa, researchers talked to families of people who died to collect information about causes of death in 2017/18.
- They found that while they could gather useful info, there were still challenges in getting enough people to participate, highlighting the need for better systems to record deaths.
Background: The South African national cause of death validation (NCODV 2017/18) project collected a national sample of verbal autopsies (VA) with cause of death (COD) assignment by physician-coded VA (PCVA) and computer-coded VA (CCVA).
Objective: The performance of three CCVA algorithms (InterVA-5, InSilicoVA and Tariff 2.0) in assigning a COD was compared with PCVA (reference standard).