Medical Examiner Officer

Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust's Medical Examiner (ME) Office is a key part of its mortality review process to support the implementation of national guidance on learning from deaths.

The successful post holder will support the MEs in their role in scrutinising the circumstances and causes of death to enable the Trust improve the experience of those patients who die in our care and the ‘aftercare’ of families/next of kin.

This is a clinically led department within the Clinical Support Business Unit.

We have ME Offices based at North Tyneside General Hospital, Wansbeck General Hospital and Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital.

This role will be rotational Trustwide with main base for the role at Wansbeck General Hospital.

You will be a point of contact/advice for relatives of deceased patients, healthcare professionals, coroner and registration services. You will provide advice and support to junior doctors/nursing staff regarding the legal requirements relating to registration of death, completion of necessary investigations including referral to the Coroner’s office and documentation for cremations. You will be responsible for the admin function of the ME service, accountable to the Operational Service Manager. You will be the first point of contact for bereaved relatives/carers, providing advice and support regarding the ME process and dealing with any concerns raised. You will collate information regarding performance of the ME service and any learning from investigations undertaken by the ME/Coroner.

We manage three major locality hospitals at North Tyneside, Wansbeck and Hexham, plus a number of smaller community hospitals and clinics from Tynemouth to Berwick on Tweed, in addition to our state-of-the-art Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital, the first of its kind in England. We also care for people in their homes and provide services from facilities in local communities such as health centres. We give people greater choice and control over their care to help them to live independently at home and avoid hospital admission where appropriate. High quality patient care is at the heart of everything we do and we strive to ensure every single patient and service user has an exceptional experience with us. We have one of the most extensive patient experience programmes of any trust in England.

**The ME service will consider and respond to 3 key issues**:
(1) The cause of death - to ensure that it is recorded accurately on the MCCD. This will minimise the potential for the registrar to decline to issue a certificate of death as a result of inappropriate or unacceptable descriptions on the MCCD and the resultant negative impact on the relatives of the deceased. They will be responsible for ensuring all relevant paperwork required by relatives is completed in a timely fashion, including additional paperwork associated with the ME process.

(2) Whether the death needs to be reported to the coroner - evidence from pilot sites and early adopters indicates that the implementation of an ME service reduces the number of inappropriate referrals to the coroner and improves the timeliness when a referral is required.

(3) Whether there are any clinical governance issues related to the death - early review of patient notes and discussions with relatives will allow timely identification of potential significant incident investigations.

The MEO will support the MEs in their role in scrutinising the circumstances and causes of death.

They will be a point of contact and source of advice for relatives of deceased patients, healthcare professionals and coroner and registration services.

The MEO will provide advice and support to junior doctors and nursing staff regarding the legal requirements relating to registration of death, completion of necessary investigations including referral to the Coroners office and documentation for cremations.