Kara Dent, Research
Fellow, West Midlands Perinatal Institute, March 2001
Recent coverage of Alder Hey (and its ensuing investigations)
has highlighted a need for proper discussion and a
national consensus on the issue of obtaining consent
for perinatal post mortems. Sadly, these recent enquiries
have led to a lack of trust by the public in the professionals
and we need to rectify this. This extraordinary forum
on the subject was very well attended and reflected
the concerns around the region on our knowledge of
this subject.
Investigations into Alder Hey arose because parents
were unaware of what procedures had been undertaken
during the post mortems of their babies and what had
then happened to those organs examined. This forces
us to review both our procedures of counselling parents,
in order to obtain consent, as well as our consent
forms and their wording.
This forum concentrated on 3 main areas:
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