The importance of the rate of pure "attended deaths at home" for objective outcome indicator for assessing the prevalence of home care in Japan

BACKGROUND@#No study has yet been performed on the importance of the rate of pure "attended deaths at home," excluding examined deaths subjected to a postmortem examination. Therefore, in the present study, we investigated actual state of pure "attended deaths at home," in order to provide reference data for the future development of end-of-life care at home.@*METHODS@#We performed a detailed survey in Yokohama City according to the type of death, age, and underlying cause of death in cases of home deaths, based on the detailed version of the Vital Statistics Survey Death Forms. Then, we divided deaths occurring in each municipality in Kanagawa Prefecture into two categories: "examined deaths" or "attended deaths," which were also stratified by the place of death, based on the Vital Statistics, and data on number of death cases subjected to postmortem examination from the Kanagawa Prefectural Police Headquarters.@*RESULTS@#In 2013, the survey in Yokohama City showed large differences in age distribution and cause of death between examined and attended deaths. In 2014, home deaths accounted for 15.7% of all deaths in the prefecture, whereas the overall proportion of attended deaths at home was 6.9%.@*CONCLUSIONS@#We should utilize the rate of pure "attended deaths at home" for objective outcome indicator.

Medicolegal Death Investigation System in America / 대한법의학회지

Medicolegal death investigations in the U.S. have become a critical part of crime investigations over the past several decades. additionally, the roles of medical examiners (MEs) and coroners have expanded beyond the field of criminal justice in recent years. despite the fact that these roles are becoming increasingly more important a systematic and comprehensive study of this complicated system is yet to be conducted. Since there is no national standard or federal system, medicolegal death investigations vary across states, districts, and counties in the U.S. In this paper, we attempted to classify the systems into three categories. We also examined the roles and work procedures that MEs and coroners commonly share across the country as well as the problems and challenges that the medicolegal death investigation system is facing today. In addition, we have also provided a brief summary of the Korean system in order to add a comparative perspective, since the Korean legal system differs substantially that of the U.S.