Medical Examiners

Trusts should review their contracts of employment, policies and guidance to ensure that, where relevant, they include and are consistent with the duty of candour.

The Department should now institute the office of Independent Medical Examiner to scrutinise those hospital deaths not referred to the Coroner.

There is no mechanism to scrutinise perinatal deaths or maternal deaths independently, to identify patient safety concerns and to provide early warning of adverse trends. This shortcoming has been clearly …

Given that the systematic review of deaths by medical examiners should be in place, as above, we recommend that this system be extended to stillbirths as well as neonatal deaths, …

It is of considerable importance that independent medical examiners are independent of the organisation whose patients' deaths are being scrutinised.

Sufficient numbers of independent medical examiners need to be appointed and resourced to ensure that they can give proper attention to the workload.

It should be a routine part of an independent medical examiners's role to seek out and consider any serious untoward incidents or adverse incident reports relating to the deceased, to …

It is important that independent medical examiners and any others having to approach families for this purpose have careful training in how to undertake this sensitive task in a manner …