Community health workers trained to conduct verbal autopsies provide better mortality measures than existing surveillance: Results from a cross-sectional study in rural western Uganda.

ABSTRACT:

Background

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, health facilities serve as the primary source of routine vital statistics. These passive surveillance systems, however, are plagued by infrequent and unreliable reporting and do not capture events that occur outside of the formal health sector. Verbal autopsies (VA) have been utilized to estimate the burden and causes of mortality where civil registration and vital statistics systems are weak, but VAs have not been widely employed in national surveillance systems. In response, we trained lay community health workers (CHW) in a rural sub-county of western Uganda to conduct VA interviews in order to assess the feasibility of leveraging CHW to measure the burden of disease in resource limited settings.

Methods and findings

Trained CHWs

SUBMITTER: Nabukalu D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6373919 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature