4th January - Postmortem Update

The number of postmortem examinations carried out in England and Wales is unjustifiably high and could be cut by 80,000 a year, according to researchers from the centre for forensic and legal medicine at the University of Dundee.

Professor Peter Furness, president of the Royal College of Pathologists, said: "We have long expressed the view that we want to be doing fewer overall coroners' postmortems and doing those that do need doing to a higher standard. However, what coroners do is not really under our control – pathologists do postmortems when asked to do so by the coroner. If you do a post-mortem you are more likely to get an accurate cause of death than if you examine the body externally, but most of the time it is a natural cause of death...''

Read more about this story on The Guardian website