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Sara Sanders, Mike Hensch, Kate Bengtson, Community Collaborations between the Medical Examiner's Office and Gerontological Service Providers: Implementation of an Older Adult Death Review Team, Health & Social Work, Volume 37, Issue 2, May 2012, Pages 123–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/hsw/hls014
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When many individuals think about death and dying and even end-of-life care, they automatically think of hospice and, more recently, palliative care. A lesser-known provider of end-of-life care and services is the medical examiner (ME) or, in some states, the coroner. The medical examiner system (MES) responds to deaths that are considered by law to affect the public interest; these include deaths that occur in sudden, unexpected ways, such as through suicide, homicide, accident, or a manner that cannot be determined even after an autopsy and thorough scene investigation. In addition, the MES has jurisdiction over deaths in which bodies are unidentified, unclaimed, or decomposed and in which people die from contagious or virulent diseases. The MES's primary responsibility is to impartially determine an accurate cause and manner of death, which then becomes part of the statistics on death in the United States.
The way that the MES is defined varies from one jurisdiction to the next. For the purpose of this article, the term “medical examiner system” refers to the entire system of individuals who function to determine an accurate cause and manner of death. These individuals include an appointed physician who serves as the chief ME, appointed physicians who serve as deputy MEs, ME investigators who have medical backgrounds and perform scene investigations, and, in some states, coroners who are elected officials responsible for medicolegal death investigations in their jurisdictions. In this article, the term “medical examiner department” (MED) refers to the physical location of the MES, specifically for Johnson County, Iowa.
