Title

Cross Sectional Study to Estimate Proportion of Soundness and Completeness of Medical Certificate of Cause of Death.

Authors

Ranjit M Tandle, Anand Pawar.

Abstract

Background: The medical certificate of cause of death (MCCD) is an important document of medicolegal significance that a doctor certifies following the death of his or her patient. The quality of death certificates is influenced by number of factors including medical education, physician knowledge and hospital resources. Therefore, writing the cause of death statements without errors is essential to build accurate mortality data that is important to measure the effectiveness of various mortality reduction programs. Methodology: The present study is Cross sectional hospital-based study where MCCD certificates from January 2021 to December 2021 from medical record department is collected for analysis of completeness and correctness. Results: A total of 456 MCCD forms were reviewed and analyzed in the present study. Out of which 291 (63.81%) were males and 165(36.18%) were females. Department wise data analysis revealed that intensive care units contributed majority of deaths (30.70%) followed by medicine department (27.27%). On analyzing the correctness of administrative data interval between condition and death was mentioned in 88.81% correctly. Analysis of correctness of cause of death showed correct entry of immediate cause of death as 98.63%, antecedent cause of death 89.69% and other significant condition 89.03%. Manner of death was correctly mentioned in 86.18% cases only. Conclusion: The MCCD scheme is a vital step in regularizing and maintaining uniformity of issuing cause of death certificate by medical practitioners. In the present study we found that incompleteness and inaccurate entries in MCCD are less than 15 %. The knowledge and skill of the staff engaged in issuing MCCD was found to be adequate.

Key words

MCCD, Immediate Cause of Death, Manner of Death, Mortality Data.

DOI

  10.59988/jfmsl.vol.33issue1.9