By Emmanuel T. Erediano
Variety News Staff

THE Department of Public Health welcomes the passage of a bill that will improve its data collecting system, according to acting Public Health Secretary Lyn Tenorio.
House Bill 15-15, which was passed by the Senate recently and now heads to the governor, establishes a health and vital statistics office in the department.
Tenorio said Public Health has only one health and vital statistics officer who has one assistant.
It usually takes a year and a half before Public Health can get the complete data on the preceding year, she added.
Most of the available data are from 2005 and include the department’s expenditures, the average number of admitted patients per day and the number of cancer cases.
Tenorio said the only data from 2006 is the number of births at the Commonwealth Health Center — 1,421. But the figure has yet to be reviewed and finalized.
Data collection is a priority for the department, she said.
“With reliable data collected at the earliest time possible, we can do cost analyses and do better intervention in connection with certain health issues,” Tenorio said.
She added that Public Health should also be responsible for keeping birth certificates and issuing copies.
Birth records are usually obtained from the court.
House Bill 15-15 states that the health and vital statistics office will install, maintain and operate a system of vital statistics at the local and national levels.
According to the bill’s proponents, the office is critical to maintaining, developing, analyzing, and disseminating information used to plan and evaluate health programs and identify specific problem areas such as infant mortality, teen pregnancy or tobacco use.