VITAL STATISTICS such as births and deaths will soon be made available to the Jamaican public with the completion of a civil registration and vital statistics manual being worked on by the Registrar General's Department (RGD).

Chief Executive Officer of the RGD, Dr Patricia Holness, gave an update on the project during a tour of the Victoria Jubilee and Kingston Public hospitals, downtown Kingston, last Friday while observing the institutions' system of collecting and collating births, deaths and other statistics.

"We are observing the process of bedside registration, and how that feeds into the significant improvements in the timeliness of registration. We are also examining the death-registry process to ensure that the manual will really mirror the facts on the ground," she said.

Holness, who is also Jamaica's deputy keeper of the records, was accompanied on the tour by a consultant from Jacaranda Consulting LLC of Florida, and officials of the Ministry of Health, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ).

Major role

She said that the project is being funded by the UNFPA, with support from other agencies, including the PIOJ, but the RGD, which is the body responsible for collating Jamaica's vital records, will play a major role in the production of the manual.

Jamaica has been developing a multi-agency Vital Statistics Commission (VSC) since 2004. The commission has a mandate to ensure that the country's vital statistics and civil-registration system meets international standards. Its work therefore includes the collection, management and use of data, as well as conducting demographic, social and gender analyses for policy development and planning.

A comprehensive audit of the civil-registration and vital-statistics system has been commissioned, and is being supported by the Pan American Health Organisation.