Smokescreens - Part 10

Death coding

One of our readers, Robert Dingwall, drew our attention to a paper called “Making Sense of Mortality” by the late sociologist Lindsay Prior. Dingwall also shared a reading list of related work he compiled some years ago, which is appended to this post.

 We cannot reproduce Prior’s work for copyright reasons, but we can summarise his important observations on the process of ICD coding and death attribution.

Working on Northern Irish death certification, Prior kicks off by describing the certificate and conducting a descriptive review of the well-known wide discrepancies between what is written on the certificate and some other source of information such as case notes or post-mortem examinations. 

Prior reports the discrepancies between certification and other sources of death information as varying between 93 to 35 per cent, a very variable and wide margin.

He mentions infections as one of the two areas with the widest margins of discrepancies (the other being cerebrovascular disease). He …