§ LORD RAGLANasked Her Majesty's Government:
What proportion of diagnoses of cause of death certified on death certificates correspond with the cause of death ascertained on post-mortem examination.
§ THE MINISTER OF STATE, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND SOCIAL SECURITY (LORD ABERDARE)Death certificates record the causes of death as certified by a doctor or coroner at the time the death was registered. These would include post-mortem findings at that time. If further information becomes available after registration, from post-mortem findings or from other sources, there is no provision to include this in the death register but the Registrar General keeps separate records for statistical analysis and has made special arrangements for reporting any such late information for inclusion in these records. A number of studies in which statistical death records have been matched against post-mortem findings have shown that failure to correspond is rare, but in view of the specialised nature of these studies it is not possible to derive from them a reliable estimate of the proportion for all cases.
House adjourned at two minutes before seven o'clock.