Anyone that watched the latest Real Story program on the BBC yesterday cannot have helped to have been affected by the contents of the program. Clearly there is a level of cover up going during the completion of death certificates with the substituting of real causes of death by general illness descriptions.
As the program points out, it’s very strange that despite serious concerns by Doctors, hospital acquired infections such as MRSA or Clostridium Difficile don’t seem to feature in death certificates. Nor does diabetes which many doctors think is reaching epidemic proportions.
I am aghast at some of the figures mentioned during the program – Government reports show that 45% of all UK Death Certificate are wrong! – hopefully the recent announcement for changes for coroners courts will go some way to correcting some of these errors, but more needs to be done, urgently.
While individual and overworked junior doctors are ‘dumped’ on by their senior colleagues to ‘fill-in’ the details with in some cases bland descriptions of death, there are still going to be a very high ‘error-rates’ with the accuracy of death certificates.
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