Postmortem examinations: general practitioners' knowledge, behaviour, and attitudes

Postmortem examinations help to educate doctors and may reassure the relatives of the person who has died.1 They provide information that may alter the future clinical management and outcome of a condition2; help ensure and indicate the quality of death cerification, on which mortality statistics are based; and may provide some indication of the quality of a patient's care. About a fifth of deaths are followed by a postmortem examination; three quarters of these are requested by coroners for legal, not medical, reasons.3 General practitioners issue over a quarter of death certificates (S Denley and A Berlin, unpublished data, 1992), but rarely request postmortem examinations; exact figures are difficult to obtain. We assessed the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour of general practitioners with respect to postmortem examinations and reports. All …