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Funeral Home Finds Women Breathing After Declared Dead

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2023 1:31 pm
by Beagle

Re: Funeral Home Finds Women Breathing After Declared Dead

Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2023 3:23 pm
by spot
By convention in typical US counties, "Emergency Medical Technicians, Paramedics, Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, Physician Assistants, and Registered Nurses pronounce death" after which the Medical Examiner's Office is notified. When you hand authority that low down the food chain you get occasional mistakes, but if you restrict who can do it then you'd create a bottleneck and additional expense.

In the UK,
When death occurs inform the medical practitioner primarily responsible for the person’s care.
In acute trusts it is helpful if verification occurs within one hour. In other settings it is helpful if it
takes place within four hours. Verification of death needs to be completed by a doctor,
appropriately registered nurse or ambulance clinician before the deceased is transferred
from the care setting.

https://hukstage-new-bucket.s3.eu-west- ... pdated.pdf
The interesting exception is that in the UK, "prisons are exempt from verification of death by registered nurses" - dying in custody requires a higher qualification.

Where would you draw the line? If you reckon that one time out of every million deaths the pronouncement is wrong, is that too many? I can't see why. You could insist it's the county coroner in person every time and you'd still be wrong once in a million pronouncements, it would just cost a lot more money. Whether an 86 year old is dead or not is often going to take guesswork, the person when alive won't have looked much different.

The cheap humane answer is to keep a mallet handy in the mortuary.