Audit study of next of kin's satisfaction with clinical necropsy service: Table 1

Abstract

The public may have considerable appreciation of the nature and purposes of necropsy,1 but these attitudes could change when people are faced with requests for necropsies on members of their own family. We investigated the level of satisfaction of bereaved relatives with a clinical necropsy service. We selected 206 consecutive requests for clinical necropsies for inclusion in our study. At least six months (range 6-14 months) after the requests had been made, a specially trained academic psychologist tried to contact the relatives whose consent had been requested. Sixty seven of the relatives were excluded because they could not be contacted, they gave incomplete information, or there were issues of confidentiality or litigation. Of the remaining 139 relatives, 75 participated in the study—31 by the preferred method of personal interview, 31 by postal …