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The purpose of this indicator is to reflect access of children and communities to basic health interventions.

This indicator measures the neonatal mortality rate. Mortality rate is the probability that a child born in a specific year or period will die before reaching 28 completed days. Mortality rates among young children are a key output indicator for child health and well-being, and, more broadly, for social and economic development. The neonatal mortality rate is a closely watched public health indicator because it reflects the access of children and communities to basic health interventions such as vaccination, medical treatment of infectious diseases and adequate nutrition.

Ministry of Health (MOH)

Ministry of Health (MOH)

Statistical Institute of Belize

Annual

Mortality rates of that period expressed per 1,000 live births.

Neonatal 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.

The neonatal mortality rate is the probability that a child born in a specific year or period will die before reaching 28 completed days of life, if subject to the age-specific mortality rates of that period, expressed per 1,000 live births. Neonatal deaths (deaths 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.

The common disaggregation for mortality indicators includes disaggregation by sex, age (neonatal, infant, child), wealth quintile, residence, and mother’s education. Disaggregated data are not always available. Disaggregation by geographic location is usually at the regional level, or the minimum provincial level for survey or census data. Data from well-functioning vital registration systems can provide further geographical breakdowns.

The UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) estimates are derived from national 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. 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).

Associated line ministries should give particular focus to the control of infectious disease in educational and medical environments as means of reducing new born/infant mortality through eradicating communicable diseases.

Many countries lack a single source of high-quality data covering the last several decades. Data from different sources require different calculation methods and may suffer from different errors. As a result, different surveys often yield widely different estimates of neonatal mortality for a given time period and available data collected by countries are often inconsistent across sources.

All the metadata shown was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.