Understanding the Residents’ Practice of Cause of Death when Completing Death Certificates in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Background: A death certificate is an official certificate signed by a doctor that states the cause of a person’s death. In most teaching hospitals, resident physicians complete the filling out of death certificates. Materials and Methods: In this research study, we conducted a cross-sectional study on 300 resident physicians from subspecialties, such as internal medicine, emergency medicine, and surgery, at King Khalid University Hospital, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The residents responded to a self-administered questionnaire. Both male and female physicians voluntarily participated in the study upon providing electronic consent. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences(SPSS) version 25 was used to measure the statistical significance of the retrieved responses. Results: The study conveys that in the last 12 months, 8% of the study participants had not filled out any death certificates. Moreover, in the last 3 years, 74.6% of the resident doctor participants had filled out a significant number of death certificates, while only 4.3% had not dealt with this document. Only 16% of the doctors filled out a death certificate for patients for whom they were the primary caregivers in most of the cases. Conclusion: The data generated through this study indicated the reasons why some inaccuracies occur in the process of filling out death certificates, which are based on the reasons accepted by the system, the language barrier, and the training received by the residents on the matter. Given these study results, we have made various recommendations for a training program based on the documented challenges and inaccuracies in filling out death certificates, irrespective of any prior training in the subject.