The WHO has published a guideline on Certification of deaths during pregnancy, childbirth, or the puerperium where confirmed or suspected COVID-19 is a cause of death.
Please click here to learn more about the coding of maternal deaths due to COVID-19.
Universal Health Coverage (UHC) includes essential health services, from health promotion to prevention, treatment, rehabilitation, and palliative care with easy access when and where services are needed without financial hardship. Thus, clinical guidelines must reflect holistic interprofessional services across the life-course, considering care at all levels and all aspects of a health condition that impact on functioning, health and well-being.
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) provides a common language that allows health professionals to share standardized information across the world. The eleventh revision contains around 17 000 unique codes and more than 120 000 codable terms is now entirely digital.
Although South Africa has a well-established Civil Registration and Vital Statistics system, the quality of mortality statistics obtained from the death notification forms completed by medical doctors is still suboptimal.
The WHO provided some recommendations and guidance to countries on ICD coding of COVID-19, which was declared a pandemic in March 2020. This resulted in updates of the Tabular List and the Alphabetical List to include the following new ICD codes for COVID-19. Click here for update 3 & 4 of the guidance and to learn more about the coding of COVID-19 in ICD-10 and ICD-11.
Post COVID-19 codes (25 September 2020)