Recommended Practice based on International Guidelines
The medical certificate of cause of death should be transmitted to the civil registrar or the statistics agencies to be used for legal and statistical purposes. In some countries, the information in the medical certificate of cause of death (or information on cause of death) is submitted to the registrar directly, who in turn submits the MCCD or cause of death data to the statistics agency. Other countries use a bifurcated form, containing a section for legal information and a section for statistical (cause of death) information. With this type of form, the legal information is submitted to the registrar and the statistical (cause of death) information is submitted directly to the statistics agency. The MCCD should not be given to the family to bring to the civil registration agency, the family may fail to report to the civil registrar.
If the law obligates the certifier of cause of death to directly transmit an MCCD to the civil registrar and statistics agency, there are two policy objectives that are met.
First, the efficient transmission of information provides the necessary information, including cause of death, to the civil registrar and statistics agency without placing an additional burden on an intermediary, often a mourning family, to convey the medical certificate of cause of death to the registrar.
Second, certifiers of cause of death are less likely to modify sensitive cause of death information if fewer people have access to and knowledge of that potentially sensitive information.
Cambodia
Legal Analysis
Under the Inter-Ministerial Prakas on Notice of Live Birth and Death, all MCCD data, whether from an in-facility or out-of-facility death, is entered into a digital health information system. After this MCCD data is coded by the Ministry of Health, MOH sends the final cause of death to the General Department of Identification (GDI) of the Ministry of Interior (MOI), which is responsible for civil registration. Under the Law on CRVSID, GDI/MOI is reponsible for submitting the data to the National Statistics Institute of the Ministry of Planning (NSI/MoP).