Medical Examiners: Death Certificates

(asked on 22nd February 2016) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of whether the nine pilot schemes for a proposed national medical examiner system improved the accuracy of death certification.


Answered by
 Portrait
Ben Gummer
This question was answered on 1st March 2016

In 2012, the Office for National Statistics published ‘A Case Study on Death Certification Reforms – the Potential Impact on Mortality Statistics, England and Wales’; the results of the study can be accessed from:

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_288141.pdf

The study is based on Medical Certificates of Cause of Death (MCCD) from five medical examiner pilot sites. Medical examiner scrutiny can change the number, sequence and type of conditions mentioned on the MCCD. This suggests that medical examiners' analysis of the information relating to the cause of death, obtained both from the medical notes and in discussion with relatives, results in better understanding of the sequence of conditions that led to the death. If the conditions and sequence are recorded more fully, this may lead to a change in the underlying cause of death. The results of this case study indicate that the medical examiner scrutiny is likely to affect trends in causes of death reported in mortality statistics. The medical examiners’ scrutiny is expected to improve the quality and contents of MCCDs prepared by doctors.

The costs and benefits of the proposed medical examiner system will be addressed within an Impact Assessment that will be published alongside a consultation document in due course.

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