Article
I am a dental nurse at Croydon University Hospital and would like to share the experience and the knowledge I gained when I was redeployed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Many dentists and dental care professionals were redeployed within the NHS to aid other severely overstretched and understaffed areas of their respective trusts. I offered my help to the extremely busy mortuary department to manage the storage and paperwork of each deceased person, ensuring people's loved ones were cared for in a dignified manor during those unprecedented times.
Our trust's mortuary accepts and stores both those who died in hospital and in the community. Unfortunately, due to lockdown and family members being unable to have regular contact with each other, some people who died at home had not been found for quite some time. This sadly meant that traditional forms of identification, such as photographs, tattoos, scars, birthmarks or fingerprints, were no longer reliable.
Working with the mortuary technicians and the coroner's office it was highlighted to me that dental records were the next reliable attribute to confirm the identity of the deceased within our care. Being a dental nurse, this meant I already had an in-depth understanding of this area of medicine, and I became very interested in the application of my employed area of work within this temporary job role.
I learned how the availability of the following to the forensic odontologist can help in the comparisons of the anti-mortem record and the individual post-mortem, once later stages of decomposition have begun:
I also had the opportunity to understand the features to be noted in clinical records for comparison. This included dentition, tooth morphology, associated bone structures, pathology and restorations. In some cases, records of lamina dura, structures of the sinus, temporomandibular joints, development of cysts and evidence of previous surgeries or trauma, were also used for comparisons.
It was interesting to know how the process works following the dental autopsy. Both sets of records are compared and a written conclusion including any findings or discrepancies is constructed. This summary is then presented to the coroner, concluding whether the identification is positive, consistent with, or an unidentified match has been found.
Having worked alongside mortuary technicians and forensic odontologists, the importance of good record keeping within the dentistry was emphasized. Unfortunately, I saw one individual who could not be identified due to poorly written anti-mortem dental records, which actively demonstrates that without clear, concise and accurate anti-mortem dental records, making comparisons becomes extremely difficult or even impossible.
From the experience I gained, I would like to emphasize that, as dental professionals, we have a duty to maintain our patient's clinical dental records as they may be needed for post-mortem identifications. This is reiterated under Principle 4 of the GDC standards: to maintain and protect patients' information.1
I thoroughly enjoyed my time working in the mortuary while being redeployed, despite the uncertainty of the pandemic. I am glad I had the opportunity to work alongside another great team within my NHS trust and also walk away with an understanding of another area of dentistry.