THE Registrar General’s Department is reporting a less than one per cent error rate in the registration of births, deaths and marriages by its offices.

According to the RGD, the error rate for births stood at 35 per cent in 1995, 20 per cent for marriages, and an “alarming” 50 per cent for deaths, with foetal and neo-natal deaths having error rates of 70 per cent.

Launching the second phase of the agency’s “Name the Child” programme at the Terra Nova Hotel in Kingston yesterday, the RGD’s chief executive officer, Dr Patricia Holness, said the achievement was the result of the increased focus on civil registration.

“I am happy to report that the error rates for all these registrations are below one per cent,” Holness said.

Of the introduction of bedside registration on January 1, 2007, Holness said the RGD had achieved 100 per cent registration of all births in hospitals within days, with 98 per cent of births being registered

with names.

“When compared to previous years, the figure stood at 31 per cent of infants named at birth and over 30 per cent are never named until many years afterwards. This is the reason we processed over 6,000 late entries of names for the period January to September this year,” the RGD head said.

Furthermore, Holness said since the introduction of the “free birth certificate initiative”, the agency had dispatched some 17,000 certificates free of cost to parents of children born up to June 2007.

Meanwhile the RGD said over 12,000 children had been named under its “Name the Child” initiative launched last year in an attempt to register 18,000 children born between January 1, 2003 and August 31, 2004 who were without birth certificates.

The agency says it will this year “be attempting to close the gap by embarking on phase two of its “Name the Child” project.

“Under this phase, 6,872 children will be named,” Holness said yesterday.

In the meantime, she said the RGD had sought to bring funeral directors into its network by granting them special access to its facility resulting in 24-hour registration of death, and intends to bring hoteliers on board by granting them access to its Application Tracking System to key in their applications for marriages.

“This will further help to enhance the nation’s tourism product as guests will leave the island with their marriage certificates printed on security paper,” Holness said.