It is important for health planners to have timeous and accurate data on
deaths. The Department of Home Affairs is responsible for the registration of
deaths and the City of Cape Town has a well established system of collating
the death statistics based on vital registration, but the completeness of the
death registration has not been assessed previously.
The completeness was assessed for the City of Cape Town by
comparing their statistics with an estimate based on data obtained from adult
deaths reported in the 2001 census. A second approach assessed the trend in
completeness between 1996 and 2004 by identifying three rates of mortality
considered to be stable over time (non-lung and non-oesophageal cancers, the
10-14 age group and the 60+ age group) and inspecting to observe whether
there was any trend apparent over time.
Since deaths in most cases are under reported, and the under reporting
usually differs in completeness between children and adults, child deaths from
the ASSA model projection assuming that they are more complete were
compared with the child deaths from the vital registration between 1996 and
2004 to check for completeness of the child vital registration data in Cape
Town and its eight health districts
The results show high levels of completeness in the adult deaths for
Cape Town as a whole in 2001, around 95 per cent, but varying levels in the
health districts. The completeness of reporting of male deaths in Cape Town
declines with age, whilst completeness for females is fairly level with respect to
age, with similar trends being observed in the health districts. Completeness
of child (0-4) death registration averaged around 60 per cent, about 35 per cent
lower than the completeness of adult deaths in Cape Town. Cape Town as a
whole and most of its health districts revealed two levels of completeness in
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the registration of deaths, 1996-1999 and 2001-2004 with 2000 sometimes
consistent with the first and sometimes with the second period or different
from either period in some of the health districts.
In conclusion the completeness estimates obtained are more rigorous
from 2001 onwards suggesting that they can be reliably used to monitor trends
in the levels of mortality in the city of Cape Town.