PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Urszula Carr
AU  - Lesley Bowker
AU  - Richard Y Ball
TI  - The slow death of the clinical post-mortem examination: implications for clinical audit, diagnostics and medical education
AID  - 10.7861/clinmedicine.4-5-417
DP  - 2004 Sep 01
TA  - Clinical Medicine
PG  - 417--423
VI  - 4
IP  - 5
4099  - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/4/5/417.short
4100  - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/4/5/417.full
SO  - Clin Med2004 Sep 01; 4
AB  - The adult clinical post-mortem examination has seriously declined in Norwich recently, with only 34 of them (representing 1.4% of deaths in hospital) having been undertaken in 2003. Moreover, the next-of-kin are increasingly restricting the extent of the examination when they give consent. Analogous but less severe changes have occurred in the post-mortem examination of stillbirths and perinates. Many clinicians are unaware of these events, which may come to have wide-ranging detrimental effects. One possible cause is the lack of training of junior medical staff in obtaining consent for postmortem examination, though other factors are also important.