The Ghana Statistical Service and the Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative have conducted a workshop for officers of the Ghana Police Service on accurate data collection on mortality resulting from road traffic, violent and external deaths.
The two-day training aims at building the capacity of the security personnel and other stakeholders with the requisite skills to collect accurate statistics on road traffic, violent and external deaths to improve the quality of mortality statistics in the country.
According to Dr. Fidelia Dake, Country Expert for the Global Grants Programme the limitations had necessitated the training of police officers to collect data on mortality from road traffic, violent and external causes as part of routine data collection processes to augment vital statistics generated from the health and civil registration systems’.
The training is part of a series of activities being carried out under the Global Grants Programme funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies under the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics arm of the Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative.
According to experts, analysis of mortality statistics from Ghana’s civil registration and health systems gave indication of the absence of results on causes of death that resulted from road traffic, violent and external causes.
Additionally, the current level of death registration is below internationally accepted standards and the quality of vital statistics generated is low.
The Ghana Statistical Service and its partners identify that the training is timely and relevant for national and international development, particularly in the area of collecting quality data for measuring indicators for the global sustainable development goals.
