Convenience Survey Regarding Autopsy/Organ Donation Education at the 1999 American Medical Association Annual Meeting

Rosenbaum et al¹ report substantial deficiencies in the understanding of chief residents in medicine and pediatrics of the basics of postmortem examination and the process of receiving informed consent when requesting an autopsy. Their findings are consistent with those from a convenience survey that the American Medical Association (AMA) administered during the 1999 Annual Meeting of the AMA House of Delegates. We applaud the authors' proposed policy to improve training with the goal of higher autopsy consent rates. The results of our convenience survey follow.