In many countries most deaths occur at home. Such countries often have civil registration systems that are limited or non-existent and therefore most deaths go unrecorded.
WHO attempted to define verbal autopsy standards to ascertaining and attributing causes of death.
A WHO VA working group was established at the first meeting of the WHO Reference Group on Global Health Statistics, 9–10 December 2013.
It brings together experts in this field, and it has agreed upon the WHO verbal autopsy Instrument 2016 for data collection in countries, based on the recent experiences.
The 2016 WHO VA instrument is designed to be compatible with electronic data collection
platforms and automated analytical software to assign cause of death.
The 2016 Instrument form (version 1.5 released on November 2017) has been developed to be used in Open Data Kit. A link to the existing version to download is available at http://www.who.int/healthinfo/statistics/verbalautopsystandards. A GitHub repository to collect comments and issues is available at https://github.com/SwissTPH/WHO_VA_2016.
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Oh cool! I worked on the SmartVA app that processes the VA data and I didn't know it was still in use. Thanks for sharing this, @aurdipas!
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SmartVa is used in some countries (http://www.healthdata.org/verbal-autopsy/tools) , this is a bit different. This is the one recommended from WHO. The SmartVA countries I'm also supporting they collect the data as well with ODK collect but not all use Agrgegate as back-end. For example the Solomon Island use kobo.
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Thnaks Aurelio, I'm working on this tools (WHO VA) in senegal (IRD) we we're use non standard questionnaires. From now we want to apply it here too.
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