Death inspection is newly regulated – salzburg.ORF.at
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The country regulates the death inspection new. In concrete terms, every doctor should be able to carry out a death examination in the future. The inquest of the dead is a prerequisite for a corpse to be transported away. The background to the new regulation is a shocking autumn from 2021.
In future, no corpse should remain in Salzburg for too long at the place where it died because no coroner could be reached. So far, only district or official doctors can carry out the death inspection.
That should change now, says health officer deputy governor Christian Stöckl (ÖVP). “The first approach is that future communities can commission additional doctors to examine the dead,” announces Stöckl to Stöckl. With an amendment to the law, which is to be passed in the state parliament in autumn, all doctors should be able to claim a death certificate in the future, says Stöckl.
“Every doctor should be able to use death examination”
“Then all doctors should be able to have the responsible body transported to the nearest morgue if they determine that someone died of natural causes and not as a result of a notifiable disease. Then it should no longer happen that a corpse lies somewhere for too long.”
This is to prevent cases like the one from 2021 from happening again. At that time, a woman from Vienna had died at her friends in Salzburg. Because after 10 p.m. none of the four medical officers could be reached in the city of Salzburg, the body could only be removed the next morning.