TY - JOUR T1 - The slow death of the clinical post-mortem examination: implications for clinical audit, diagnostics and medical education JF - Clinical Medicine JO - Clin Med SP - 417 LP - 423 DO - 10.7861/clinmedicine.4-5-417 VL - 4 IS - 5 AU - Urszula Carr AU - Lesley Bowker AU - Richard Y Ball Y1 - 2004/09/01 UR - http://www.rcpjournals.org/content/4/5/417.abstract N2 - 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. ER -