edquist78/perinatal-mortality-northern-ghana

# Perinatal Mortality in Northern Ghana — Analysis Code Reproducible analysis for: > **Prevalence and Demographic Characteristics of Stillbirths and Perinatal Deaths: > A Five-Year Retrospective Study at a Regional Hospital in Northern Ghana** > (Ngman-Wara GM, Quist ED, Abdul-Rahaman L — manuscript in preparation) This repository contains the complete, scripted data-cleaning and analysis pipeline used to produce every number, table and figure reported in the manuscript. ## What the analysis does Using de-identified routine hospital records from the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS) of the Upper West Regional Hospital, Wa, Ghana (1 January 2021 – 31 December 2025), the script: 1. **Loads and harmonises** three source workbooks (stillbirth register, neonatal mortality log, 2022 register line-list update, annual delivery totals), including parsing of free-text values ("41 WEEKS", "3.1KG", "Above 5"), standardising misspelled entries, and de-duplication. 2. **Answers the study's four research questions**: - Q1 — five-year prevalence and trends of stillbirth, early neonatal and perinatal mortality (rates per 1,000 with exact Poisson 95% CIs, chi-square homogeneity tests, delivery-weighted linear trend tests); - Q2 — maternal demographic characteristics of affected mothers (case–case comparison: stillbirths vs early neonatal deaths); - Q3 — obstetric and clinical factors, including a multivariable logistic regression contrasting fresh (intrapartum proxy) with macerated (antepartum proxy) stillbirths; - Q4 — antepartum vs intrapartum classification and a full documentation-gap audit (missingness, biological plausibility of gestational age–birth weight pairs, data-quality flags). 3. **Writes all outputs** (CSV tables and PNG figures) to `analysis_output/` and a full console report to `run_log.txt`. 4. **Reports explicitly which study questions cannot be answered** with the available data (e.g., no live-birth co …