Medical Examiners and Death Certification

Debate between Lord West of Spithead and Lord O'Shaughnessy

Wednesday 18th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

In 2009, a certain amount of work was done on how we would handle mass deaths should they occur because of some crisis or emergency. Does any of the current work affect that? Does that work still stand, so that we can handle such events properly?

[Lord O'Shaughnessy]

I think that the difference here is between handling mass deaths, which would obviously be an emergency situation—so we are talking about contingency and resilience planning—and looking at all deaths. About half a million people die each year. At the moment, only those who go through coroners receive that additional level of investigation, except in those pilot sites and early adopter areas that I mentioned. The new arrangements are about making sure that there is a system of verifying deaths from normal causes.