Seamus Burns welcomes an attempt to prevent the wrongful diagnosis of death
Benjamin Franklin famously said there were only two certainties in life, namely death and taxation.
The recent publication by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, A Code of Practice for the Diagnosis and Confirmation of Death, represents the medical profession's latest attempt to nail down and clarify when it is appropriate to diagnose and confirm when someone is dead.
The code is designed to remove ambiguities in the way death was diagnosed in the earlier 1998 code and to take cognisance of the technological innovations in medical practice in the last decade. Arguably, too it seeks to address the horror stories (anecdotal in some cases) of patients diagnosed as dead by doctors, allegedly coming back from the dead. Indeed the BBC, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 revealed last year that patients in five English hospitals had been incorrectly diagnosed as being dead over the past five years.
Dr Jan Bondeson, Professor of Rheumatology at Cardiff University, is concerned that the phenomenon of wrongful diagnosis of death could be more
