Specialist nurses boost consent to post-mortem child research

Article: 'Prospective parental consent for autopsy research following sudden unexpected childhood deaths: a successful model', in Archives of Disease in Childhood (Online First). A study published today by researchers at the UCL Institute of Child Health (ICH) and Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) suggests that most parents are willing to consent to post-mortem research on their children, providing that they are approached by specialist nurses experienced in bereavement and family counselling. Post-mortem research is crucial to understanding cases of sudden, unexpected death in children. Following the Alder Hey organ retention scandal, however, in which children's tissue was retained for research without consent, recent changes to legislation and coroners? rules have made it difficult to carry this out. Most cases of unexplained death in children are automatically referred to the coroner, who cannot authorise tissue to be kept for research without explicit parental consent. But many coroners are neither trained, nor have the resources, to seek parental consent, and ing newly bereaved parents to obtain consent is often seen as unethical, say the authors. As a result of this, tissue is disposed of, as it must be by law, and so lost to research. In a bid to reverse this trend, researchers at the UCL ICH and GOSH ' including Andrew Taylor, Principal Investigator and lead of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging research group at the UCL ICH - piloted a telephonic consenting system as part of a Department of Health 'less invasive autopsy?