Excellencies,
Distinguished delegates,
Partners, colleagues, and friends,
I would like to start by thanking you for your commitment to make every birth and every death count in the Asia-Pacific region. Your statements endorsing the Ministerial declaration today are an encouragement and inspiration for our multilateral efforts.
The health sector is an important conduit for notifying, promoting, and tracking births and deaths, including cause-of-death.
Health workers are uniquely positioned to record this information. They have longstanding trusting relationships with individuals, across the life course. They provide care during pregnancy and childbirth; support during illness and hospitalization; and have sustained contact through community-based services.
They are often involved in terminal care and often present around the time of death. This allows them to observe and document critical information, including likely causes of death.
Their proximity to these life events, and their medical expertise, make them well suited for the timely and accurate detailing of information.
The health sector has a unique role in recording cause-of-death and ascertaining epidemiological patterns of fatal diseases. It informs key markers of health and development, and the factors surrounding shortfalls of care.
Institutions within the health sector have a central role in reporting routine data to civil registration authorities. This supports the generation of vital statistics needed by governments to track demographic data.
In this regard, I call on your commitment to support technical and capital investment for the integration of data into digital health management information systems (HMIS) and digital solutions. This investment will enable the optimal sharing of information between the CRVS systems and the health sector and facilitate data analysis
I call on you to have a formal memorandum of understanding between health ministries and national registrars. This should provide for the seamless exchange of information on individual live birth, stillbirth and death records while ensuring confidentiality, privacy and security.
I call on your commitment to build the capacities of your community- and facility-based health workers. They must be empowered and trained to complete standard notification forms for live births, stillbirths or deaths that include the information needed for the events to be officially registered.
As you are aware, the SDGs call for monitoring several cause-specific mortality targets. I call on your commitment to invest in training your medical doctors and to support them to practice accurate medical certification of cause-of-death. This should be in accordance with the rules and standards of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). In this regard, I am pleased to inform you that WHO is supporting countries to transition to ICD-11, including a swift uptake of its automated tools and guidance materials.
Most deaths in our communities and countries still occur without medical supervision. This results in inadequate data on patterns of causes-of-death, and insufficient information for policy decisions. In such circumstances, I call on you to promote and train your health workers to apply verbal autopsy methods that can generate cause-of-death data of acceptable quality.
Developing multisectoral, nationally owned, inclusive, scalable, sustainable and cost-effective CRVS systems is achievable. It requires an “all-of government” approach, including the engagement of the highest levels of political governance.
In this regard, I am heartened by all the commitments expressed today and applaud your leadership.
I have called for your commitment to several different areas today.
I would also like to say that we, as the WHO, stand ready to answer your call. We remain ready to partner with you in this important journey to make every birth and death count.
Thank you.