Between January and February 2018, Raquel Barbosa de Lima, from the Department of Health Situation Analysis, Ministry of Health, Brazil, came to the University of Melbourne (UoM) to take part in the CRVS fellowship program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
During her time at the UoM she received support in her fellowship project. The project reviewed and analysed the data produced from a critical study conducted in 2015. The study investigated key attributes of deaths with ill-defined and unusable causes of death, and corresponding ‘garbage codes’.
Fellow Raquel Barbosa de Lima from the Ministry of Health, Brazil
In November 2019, the Brazilian Journal of Epidemiology published Raquel's fellowship project. The article outlines a comprehensive strategy used to investigate garbage code deaths that occurred in 2015. The implementation of the strategy resulted 92.6% of cases having their underlying cause changed to a usable ICD-10 code.
Raquel thanks Bloomberg Philanthropies and the University of Melbourne for providing the fellowship program through the Data for Health Initiative.