3.2.2 Neonatal Mortality Rate

BAGUIO CITY DATA SOURCE: Health Services Office (HSO)

Global Definition:
The neonatal mortality rate is the probability that a child born in a specific year or period will die during the first 28 completed days of life if subject to age-specific mortality rates of that period, expressed per 1000 live births.

Neonatal deaths (deaths among live births during the first 28 completed days of life) may be subdivided into early neonatal deaths, occurring during the first 7 days of life, and late neonatal deaths, occurring after the 7th day but before the 28th completed day of life.

Computation:
The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) estimates are derived from nationally representative data from censuses, surveys or vital registration systems. The UN IGME does not use any covariates to derive its estimates. It only applies a curve fitting method to good-quality empirical data to derive trend estimates after data quality assessment. In most cases, the UN IGME estimates are close to the underlying data. The UN IGME aims to minimize the errors for each estimate, harmonize trends over time and produce up-to-date and properly assessed estimates. The UN IGME produces neonatal mortality rate estimates with a Bayesian spline regression model which models the ratio of neonatal mortality rate / (under-five mortality rate – neonatal mortality rate). Estimates of NMR are obtained by recombining the estimates of the ratio with the UN IGME-estimated under-five mortality rate. See the references for details.

For the underlying data mentioned above, the most frequently used methods are as follows:

Civil registration: Number of children who died during the first 28 days of life and the number of births used to calculate neonatal mortality rates.

Censuses and surveys: Censuses and surveys often include questions on household deaths in the last 12 months, which can be used to calculate mortality estimates.

Surveys: A direct method is used based on a full birth history, a series of detailed questions on each child a woman has given birth to during her lifetime. Neonatal, post-neonatal, infant, child and under-five mortality estimates can be derived from the full birth history module.

source: https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/