JCE and Public Health seek to improve death registries

Ramón Jáquez Liranzo and Daniel Rivera met yesterday at the headquarters of the electoral body.

Santo Domingo, DR

The Central Electoral Board (JCE) and the Ministry of Public Health are taking steps to improve the inter-institutional relationship and strengthen the weaknesses in the civil registry, mainly on the reportage of deaths.

The rapprochement comes days after the publication of statistics that revealed differences between deaths due to Covid-19, disclosed by Public Health, and the deaths registered by the JCE for the same cause.

“What has happened is an opportunity to improve,” expressed the president of the JCE, Román Jáquez Liranzo, before a meeting, in his office, with the Minister of Public Health, Daniel Rivera.

Jáquez Liranzo considers that it is necessary to improve the inter-institutional relationship, in what has to do with interoperability, so that the information received by the JCE follows specific standards that can be established through an agreement.

He specified that the function of the JCE is to register what a death form or certificate says.

“The idea is to work and strengthen areas of weakness and ambiguity,” he said.

Jáquez Liranzo exposed the need for a modification of Law 659 on acts of civil status, which dates back more than 70 years, proposing that it be established that the declarations of deaths made by the mayors of the townships be certified by a health center. He recalled that of the 8,659 deaths registered in the JCE since March 2020, 659 were raised by pedestrian mayors.

“That has to be modified, it must be established that the forms must go to a health center to be certified by Public Health, because the pedestrian mayor does not have the expertise to declare the death of someone. This is a weakness and we have to turn it into a strength”, he stated. He pointed out that this aspect is included in the draft reform of the law presented by the Board.

Deaths due to Covid 19
The JCE reported that as of Thursday of last week, they had registered 8,656 deaths due to Covid-19, while Public Health had reported 4,014 as of that date.

CIVIL STATUS
Systems.
On 10 September, the Ministry of Public Health reported that there are different registration systems and that in the case of the civil status of the Central Electoral Board, these are documents filled out on the fly at the moment of death and do not necessarily reflect an accurate diagnosis. Furthermore, it indicated that the Directorate of Epidemiology classifies deaths according to international criteria.