| Summary: | Includes bibliographical references.This thesis describes the conceptualisation, development and implementation of a mortuary-based system for the routine collection of information about homicide. It traces the evolution of the system from its conceptualisation in 1994, through various iterations as a city-level research tool, to a national sentinel system pilot, as a multicity all-injury surveillance system, and finally its institutionalisation as a provincial injury mortality surveillance system in the Western Cape. In so doing, it demonstrates that the data arising from medico-legal post-mortem investigations described in this thesis were an important source of descriptive epidemiological information on homicide. The 37,037 homicide records described in the thesis were drawn from Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria, for which the surveillance system maintained full coverage from 2001 to 2005. The aim was to apply more complex statistical analysis and modelling than had been applied previously
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