WHO Consultants in Statistical Centre of Iran

   Mr. Alan Donald Lopez, Director of Global Burden of Disease Group Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, and Ms. Lene Birgitte Bjorklund Mikkelsen, Chief Executive Officer of LM-Consulting on Projects related to Health Information as the consultants of WHO visited the SCI on September 27, 2014. The main objective of this visit was to discuss the civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) status and the methods of calculating death indicators in the country specially the CRVS and presenting new methods for improving and enhancing the quality and integrity of CRVS. In their visit, Mr. Lopez and Ms. Mikkelsen had a meeting with the experts of the Office of Population, Labor Force, and Census and  discussed the status of CRVS and the cooperation among the SCI; Ministry of Health, Treatment, and Medical Education; and National Organization for Civil Registration. In this session, the following issues were discussed:  the role and importance of registers and their usages in the surveys and population censuses, the experiences of other countries about encouraging people to register the birth and death of the family members, the importance of improving the quality of health statistics especially the complete registration of birth and death, and new methods for registering and reporting new birth and death (mobile registration). The WHO consultants expressed that the quality of registration data of the three organizations can be evaluated through sharing their data. According to them, the data resulted from the population census and registers are two information sources which are of great importance and can be compared and be supplemented by each other.