Knowledge, Attitudes, And Practice Survey About Drafting Medical Certificates of Death by Doctors: Preliminary Results

• Wiem Ben AMAR

  Department of Forensic medicine, Habib Bourguiba University Hospital, Sfax; Tunisia ,

Introduction: The writing of medical certificates of death (MCD) is a medical act that any physician may have to perform in his daily practice. Medical and legal consequences may result from the quality of its writing. The objectives of our work were to evaluate the knowledge and attitudes of physicians concerning the rules of writing MCD to propose corrective measures to the insufficiencies noted.
Methods: This is a cross-sectional study, over a period of two months (March 1st, 2022, to May 1, 2022) among general practitioners and specialists of public health and installed in private in the region of Tataouine.
Results: During the study period, we designed a questionnaire of 30 items with simple or multiple-choice questions. 34 doctors responded to this questionnaire. 50% of the doctors received continuing education on the rules for writing MCD. Concerning the administrative section, 55.9% of the physicians filled in all the boxes concerning the information on the deceased, and 88.2% filled in all the boxes concerning the information identifying the certifying physician.
Concerning the medical section, the box for a medicolegal obstacle to burial was checked in 94.1% of cases. The cause of death was mentioned by 88.2% of the physicians, and the sequence of causes of death was mentioned in 85.3% of cases. The causal hierarchy was respected in 73.5% of cases. This medical part, which is confidential, was covered by 82.3% of the physicians.
Conclusion: Our study showed that the quality of death certificate writing suffered from several deficiencies, which encourages us to make greater efforts in training doctors.

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