HAT - info from the coroner

Dear Colleagues ,

I am facing big problems getting any information from the coroner of any patients who have died of a PE , or have PE as a sideline!!

How do you all manage this?

It is particularly difficult here  following an issue a few years ago when info got into the media before the inquest

happy for you to email me - [email protected]

or add comments here

thank you 

Hi Sue, Can't get this info' in Leicester either. We only hear from the coroner when they issue a section 28 letter. I tried (years ago) to get the information from Births/Deaths/Marriages Registrar. They were happy for me to use the Deaths info', but could only send it to me as pdf's so not practical to manually trawl for PE's.

Hi Sue

I have been very fortunate and have a contact at our Coroner's in Leamington Spa - our Bereavement Team have been helpful with creating the link as well. 

They do not inform us of any PE deaths as such but if any of my recent VTE patients go to Coroner, they are happy for me to contact them for the 1a COD.

Leicester are helpful if I ring them as well if we have to send the patient there for a more indepth post mortem 

It's not ideal but unless we have something issued as a guideline nationally, I think that there will be variations everywhere. 

@Becs Walsh - do you not have something from the Coroner that helps you or did I dream that one? 

We were also fortunate to get our Coroners on board in the early days. They didn't get it first but I think were impressed that we were trying to find cases where we could have done better & improve our own practice, rather than wait for them to shout at us. At first we had to trawl through their entire database to identify where PE was the cause of death, which was traumatising to say the least. Now they send us a spreadsheet with relevant info. The data is always at least 3 months post-identification of cause of death, which can in turn be a long time since the date of death, so I am sure you could assure your Coroner that you won't know anything earlier than anyone else @sue bacon

As ever so much of this was relational - there was a Coroners officer who was very supportive of what we were doing and we built a good working relationship with him.

Good luck Sue