Uniform and inclusive autopsy performa in India: a crosssectional study and recommendations thereof

Background and aims: Autopsy is an exhaustive practice and has serious medical, social and legal consequences. One should be cautious in medicolegal practice, keeping in mind that the genesis of this work is doubt, litigation, review and re-examination at various stages until conclusion by the court. One of the crucial and deciding factors in an investigation process is autopsy. Leave aside the conduction of autopsy by different categories of doctors; there is enormous variation in autopsy performa of different states/ regions of India. Moreover, there is no mention of dental autopsy findings in this performa. Therefore, the study proposes a uniform and inclusive postmortem examination form in India for better documentation. Materials and methods: After conducting the research into five stages: a collection of 30 Postmortem forms; conducting interviews and questionnaire surveys among 250 forensic doctors; framing a uniform and digitalized Postmortem form including a performa for dental profiling and foetal autopsy; reviewing the form with 24 forensic doctors and finalizing after suggestions given by the experts. Results: It was found that over 80% of the Forensic doctors were unsatisfied with their current Autopsy performa in different sections. Coming to their practice in dental profiling, only 15.7% had a section of dental profiling included in their primary form. In contrast, only 19.7% of them recorded the dental findings in all the cases and the majority of them, i.e., 74.8%, recorded only in unknown/unidentified cases. Conclusion: An attempt to draft a uniform, relevant, informative, detailed, scientific, diagrammatic and digitalized form is made. In recommended performa, all the crucial attributes of an autopsy examination have been included to assist in the proper report preparation and sound judgments and conclusions.