BMJ  2004;328:166 (17 January), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7432.166-a

Letter

Death of the teaching autopsy

Autopsy is a success story in Cuba

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Advances in sophisticated antemortem diagnostic methods may have reduced the value of autopsy.¹ The percentage of deaths without clinical-pathological concordance has not decreased despite modern diagnostic technologies.² Indeed, in certain cases these new methods have misled the diagnosis, partly because of doctors' excessive confidence in them.

Ours is the main provincial hospital for adult patients with clinical and surgical disorders. All services, including autopsy, are free of charge, as in the rest of Cuba. The hospital has 520 beds and more than 15 000 admissions and about 1100 deaths yearly. Since its opening 24 years ago, autopsy has been performed on more than 80% of cases.

Consent to autopsy is always voluntary and obtained from relatives or a proxy after a detailed explanation of all benefits of the postmortem examination by the clinician(s) in charge of the patient. Families can ask questions about the procedure and are told . . . [Full text of this article]

department of internal medicine, espinosa@perla.inf.cu

department of pathology

department of internal medicine

department of internal medicine, Hospital Dr Gustavo Aldereguia Lima, Ave 5 de Septiembre and Calle 51A, Cienfuegos, 55 100, Cuba

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