A death certificate is a permanent record of the fact of and characteristics of death. It provides important personal information about the decedent, the circumstances and cause of death and serves as the main source of mortality statistics for a country. Death certificates should be completed by medical doctors in alignment with international standards and practices recommended by the Word Health Organisation. The use of these standardised guidelines enables accuracy in completion of the causes of death and therefore and comparability of causes of death data and statistics across countries and regions. Unfortunately, in many developing countries doctors do not receive sufficient training on how to accurately certify deaths in alignment with these international standards. To address this gap, in the Pacific region, the Brisbane Accord group (BAG) has over the years been providing routine training to medical doctors on this subject. In order to meet existing training needs in a sustainable manner, BAG partners found it necessary to promote the institutionalisation of this training into formal academic programmes of training institutions for doctors in the region. This curriculum is developed for this purpose i.e., it is developed as a guide for academic training institutions that may want to institutionalise training on medical certification of cause of death into their academic programmes.
Read the MCCD report.