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Quality of vital statistics on causes of death
20.
A review of the literature of death reporting in Thailand suggests that while the degree of
underreporting of deaths has been well documented, much less is known about the reliability of cause
of death reporting in Thailand, although it is suspected to be poor given the high proportion of deaths
that takes place outside hospitals. Moreover, of the roughly 400,000 deaths captured by the
registration system each year, about 35%-40% are coded as an “ill-defined” cause. This proportion
has not changed much over the past four decades (see Table 2).
21.
In 2005, about 65% of deaths in Thailand took place outside hospitals. In these cases, the
cause of death was mostly attributed by a non-medically trained person who would not be familiar
with the concept of the underlying cause leading to death, hence the frequent use of ill-defined codes.
More worrying, however, is the fact that a significant number of those who appear to have died from a
specific cause were assigned that cause by a relative or non-medically trained person. This suggests a
strong likelihood of diagnostic misclassification and hence the reported cause of death distribution
may not be all that reliable for public health purposes.
E/ESCAP/CST/INF/9
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