A group of doctors, healthcare experts, and lawyers in Germany are in the final stages of drafting a detailed proposal for establishing the nation’s first national mortality registry, which could be used for medical, social, and public health research.

Ulrich Mueller, co-chairman of the 12 member working group that is drafting the proposal for the national death index, told the BMJ that attempts in the past to establish such a registry had failed, blocked by Germany’s stringent privacy laws and opposition from privacy advocates.

Dr Mueller, director of the Institute of Medical Sociology and Social Medicine at the University of Marburg, in the central state of Hesse, said that the proposal would probably be completed in June and would include recommendations for quality and procedural standards of a mortality registry and how those recommendations could …