A death certificate is a document issued by a government offical, such as a government registrar, that declares the date, location and cause of a person's death.

Each governmental jurisdiction prescribes the form of the document for use in its purview and the procedures necessary to legally produce it. One purpose of the certificate is to review the cause of death to determine if foul-play occurred.

The authorities may require a certificate from a physician or coroner to validate the cause of death. In cases where it is not completely clear that a person is dead (usually because their body is being sustained by life support), a neurologist is often called in to verify brain death and to fill out the appropriate documentation.

The failure of a physician to immediately submit the required form to the government (to trigger issuance of the death certificate) is often both a crime and cause for loss of one's license to practice. This is because of past scandals in which dead people continued to receive public benefits or "voted" in elections.

In the United Kingdom, in 2000, the mass-murderer Doctor Harold Shipman was found to have issued false death certificates for his victims. Following the public enquiry into that case, all death certificates must now be validated by an independent medical examiner.

See also

• Birth certificate

External links

• Mortality Data from the U.S. National Vital Statistics System - See Methods - Data collection - for copies of death certificates and how to fill them.
• Magrane BP, Gilliland MGF, and King DE. Certification of Death by Family Physicians. American Family Physician 1997 Oct 1;56(5):1433-8. PMID 9337765 full text

Huffman GB. Death certificates: why it matters how your patient died. [Editorial]. American Family Physician 1997 Oct 1;56(5):1287-8,1290 PMID 9337753 full text