This document provides guidance on how to improve the quality of cause of death data in hospitals, and will be useful for Ministry of Health staff, hospital administrators and managers, medical society officers, medical education leaders, and physicians. It will also be of interest to stakeholders involved in planning and strengthening civil registration and vital statistics systems, as it provides overall guidance on the steps required in improving hospital data. This is an important step towards better population-level data, as many countries rely on hospitals and other health facilities for their mortality statistics. Hospitals themselves can also benefit from improved mortality statistics by seeing the distribution of facility deaths, studying case fatality rates, analysing data by place of residence of the decedent, and so on.
