Undertaking post-mortems (or autopsies) raises a number of medico-legal-ethical implications. One of the most central is whether consent needs to (or should) be sought from the relatives of the person who has passed away. Given that the trend in Europe is away from seeking consent, the European Critical Care Foundation convened a conference in early March to discuss this sensitive issue.
The conference was hosted by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and it took place in London. As well as the topic of autopsies without consent, the meeting also looked at why autopsies were in decline in general as a diagnostic tool. The reason for this is due to other analytical methods that can offer clues as to the cause of death.
Such modern methods do not work in all cases and the results can be inconclusive and sometimes wrong. For these reasons, doctors and scientists across are starting to question if important information about cause of death, that only autopsies can provide, is being missed.
One figure produced by the conference is that a post-mortem typically identifies something that, if known during life, would have altered the care given in about 20 percent of intensive care unit deaths. That is, examining dead bodies can still provide valuable information for current medical practice.
The other issue discussed was the matter of consent. According to Professor Peter Furness, of the Nuffield Council, the country with the lowest rate of consent is the U.K. Here fewer than 1 in 1000 of deaths are followed by a consented post-mortem.
Such issues are rarely considered by the general public, yet they pose important medical and ethical issues.
