Postmortem examinations can also confirm that the patient received adequate care in the face of their illness and alleviate any guilt a family member might feel for not being able to do more. Autopsy allows a deeper exploration into what caused death in a patient which can be vitally important to bringing closure to families especially in instances of sudden or quick deaths. 3įamilies can also benefit from having a medical autopsy performed on a loved one.
Finally, autopsies can help pathology residents learn to communicate findings to clinicians and enhance medical communication skills needed to become a successful pathologist. If autopsies are not readily available to the pathology resident, the skills needed for postmortem examination decline, further making autopsy a less valuable tool.
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Learning how to perform an autopsy is likewise essential training for the pathology resident.
Through dissection of the body, students and residents can better understand disease progression and how it can lead to eventual death, an experience that simply cannot be read in a textbook. First, performing autopsies allows not only the one doing the procedure to become proficient in anatomy but also becomes a valuable tool to teach other students. 2Īdditionally, students and physicians in training benefit from the practice of autopsy for a variety of reasons. All of these aspects become important to provide quality assurance of care and continue to educate physicians on how diseases may be managed or cured. On the medical practitioner side, autopsies can disclose whether a correct diagnosis was rendered, how the disease progressed and possibly discover new aspects of a disease not previously described. 1 To this day, clinicians, students, and families can continue to benefit from what is discovered during the medical autopsy. In more recent times, postmortem examinations became the cornerstone for understanding disease within the medical community. This study demonstrates that physician conversation with families on autopsy leads to an increased chance of autopsy consent.įor thousands of years, dissections of the human body occurred mostly for religious and cultural reasons. The emergence of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has re-established the value of autopsy, as seen by increased autopsy rates in the past year. Additionally, the biggest reason for families not consenting to autopsy was because they believed they already knew what caused death. Our results showed a doubling in autopsy consent when autopsy was discussed by the physician. At the same time, we analyzed whether families are more willing to consent to autopsy if physicians are involved in autopsy discussion at the time of death, and what may be the reasons for not wanting an autopsy. In this study we aim to determine if physicians believe autopsies are essential to patient care through discussion of autopsy with families. Despite its importance in establishing cause of death and elucidating pathophysiology of disease, rates of hospital autopsies continue to decline. Autopsy has been one of the most powerful diagnostic tools in medicine for over a century.
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