Issue a Death Certificate

Who / when: the certifying physician (the doctor who confirms the cause of death) together with the vital registrar (the staff member who runs the death register), at the point a recorded death is ready to be made official. By now the death has already been registered against the deceased and the cause of death captured against ICD-11 (the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, 11th revision — the standard code list for causes of death). Issuing the certificate is the signed, legal step that turns that record into a civil document and clears the body for release. Veona will not let you cut a corner here: the signature is real, and the release will not complete until every gate is satisfied.

We’ll follow Dr Okafor, certifying a death so the registrar can release the body.

Caution

Issuing a death certificate is a signed act, re-authenticated with the certifying physician’s eSign PIN (a 6-digit signing code, separate from the login password — typing it is a legal signature). Once the certificate is issued and the body is released, the record is locked. Confirm the deceased’s identity and the cause of death before you sign.

1. Vital Registrar — open Vital Records → Register and find the death record. It must already have its cause of death recorded against ICD-11; if it doesn’t, complete the record first on Vital Records → New Record (see Manage a Death From Mortuary Bay to Release).
2. Vital Registrar — open Vital Records → Certificate for that record. You’ll see the Issue checklist — the set of gates that must all be green before the certificate can be issued.
3. Vital Registrar — work through the checklist. Three of the gates are derived — Veona sets them automatically from the record’s real state, and you cannot tick them by hand:
   • eSignature — clears when the certifying physician signs (the next step).
   • CRVS acknowledgement — clears when the civil-registration authority has accepted the event (see “What happens next”).
   • Mortuary balance — clears when the mortuary account for the deceased is settled. Two more are attestations the registrar confirms: next of kin notified and identity verified.
4. Certifying Physician — when the cause of death and the record are correct, select the issue action to open the eSign confirm. Enter your 6-digit eSign PIN and confirm. This is the signature that clears the eSignature gate.
5. Vital Registrar — once every gate on the checklist is green, select “Issue & release body”. Veona issues the certificate, renders the official branded certificate PDF, and stores it encrypted. After release you can select “Print certificate”.

Note

The gates are enforced securely, not just shown on screen. If you try to issue the certificate while a blocking gate is still outstanding, Veona refuses the issue. If you try to release the body while the registry acknowledgement or the eSignature is still missing, Veona refuses the release. The on-screen checklist is your guide, but the real decision is made by the record’s true state — there is no way to talk past it.

Caution

The CRVS acknowledgement gate only clears once your facility’s national civil-registration (CRVS) connection is set up — CRVS stands for Civil Registration & Vital Statistics, the national authority that registers births and deaths. Until your administrator has connected Veona to that authority under Vital Records → Settings, the registry gate stays open and the certificate cannot be fully issued and the body released. The signature itself works regardless; it is the civil-registration handshake that waits on the connection.

What happens next

The issued certificate is a branded PDF, rendered through the same central signing and document pipeline that produces every other Veona certificate, and held in encrypted storage — so it can be re-printed but never quietly altered. The signature, the cause of death, and the release are all written to the tamper-evident audit trail. With the registry acknowledgement received and the certificate issued, the body release gate is satisfied and the body can be released. The registered death then becomes part of the vital-events feed that is reported onward — carry it through Export Vital Events to DHIS2.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Manage a Death From Mortuary Bay to Release
• Next: Export Vital Events to DHIS2
• Related: Issue a Birth Certificate