Doyle Y G, Harrison M, O'Malley F
Department of Community Medicine, Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School, London.
J Public Health Med. 1990;12(2):118-23. doi: 10.1093/oxfordjournals.pubmed.a042528.
One hundred death certificates were compared over two time periods with the corresponding autopsy reports on the cases to ascertain if the causes of death from the two sources were similar. There was poor concordance between the two and it seems likely that reasons for requesting an autopsy did not extend to using the information to complete the death certificates. There were 55 errors on 45 certificates, and 19 certificates were so inaccurate as to warrant a change in the underlying cause of death. In only 10 cases was the certificate signed before the autopsy report was available; however, should clinicians have wished to add autopsy findings to the certificate later, there is no facility on the Irish death certificate to do so. A revision of the format of the certificate is recommended. An examination of death certificates from varied medical sources would be welcome to see if the serious errors identified in this study are more widespread.
在两个时间段内，对100份死亡证明与相应病例的尸检报告进行了比较，以确定这两种来源的死因是否相似。两者之间的一致性较差，请求进行尸检的原因似乎并未延伸到利用这些信息来填写死亡证明。45份证明上有55处错误，19份证明的不准确程度足以 warrant 对根本死因进行更改。只有10例证明是在尸检报告出来之前签署的；然而，如果临床医生希望之后在证明中添加尸检结果，爱尔兰的死亡证明上没有这样做的机制。建议对证明的格式进行修订。欢迎对来自不同医学来源的死亡证明进行检查，看看本研究中发现的严重错误是否更为普遍。
