About the Verbal Autopsy System

Why verbal autopsy

Most deaths in Zambia occur at home, without a clinician present and without a medically certified cause. Those deaths are invisible to facility-based reporting, which means national mortality statistics systematically under-represent exactly the communities that most need attention.

Verbal autopsy closes that gap. A trained interviewer visits the household after a respectful mourning period and works through a structured questionnaire with a close caregiver, recording the signs, symptoms and circumstances that preceded the death. An automated algorithm then assigns a probable cause from those responses.

What the CMS does

The Verbal Autopsy Content Management System is the layer between field data collection and national mortality statistics. It receives completed interviews, tracks each record through review and coding, runs the cause-assignment algorithms, and publishes the aggregate results that appear on this site.

It also holds the programme's documentation: the interview instrument, standard operating procedures, training materials, analytical reports and the open datasets released for research use.

Governance

The system is operated by the Surveillance and Disease Intelligence directorate at ZNPHI, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics programme. Record-level data never leaves the institute; published outputs are aggregate and suppressed at small cell counts.