Medical Examiner Officer
The closing date is 11 May 2026
Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust's Medical Examiner (ME) Office is a key part of its mortality review process to support the implementation of national guidance on learning from deaths.
The successful post holder will support the MEs in their role in scrutinising the circumstances and causes of death to enable the Trust to improve the experience of those patients who die in our care and the "aftercare" of families/next of kin.
This is a clinically led department within the Clinical Support Business Unit. We have ME Offices based at North Tyneside General Hospital, Wansbeck General Hospital and Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital. This role will be rotational Trustwide with the main base at North Tyneside General Hospital. We have 1 permanent role available. Please note we reserve the right to close this vacancy prior to the closing date once the required number of suitable applications have been received.
Main duties of the job
You will be a point of contact/advice for relatives of deceased patients, healthcare professionals, the coroner and registration services. You will provide advice and support to junior doctors and nursing staff regarding the legal requirements relating to registration of death and the completion of necessary investigations, including referral to the Coroner's office. You will be responsible for the admin function of the ME service, accountable to the Operational Service Manager, and will collate information regarding the performance of the ME service and any learning from investigations undertaken by the ME/Coroner.
About us
We manage three major locality hospitals at North Tyneside, Wansbeck and Hexham, plus a number of smaller community hospitals and clinics from Tynemouth to Berwick on Tweed, in addition to our state‑of‑the‑art Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital. We also care for people in their homes and provide services from facilities in local communities such as health centres. High quality patient care is at the heart of everything we do and we strive to ensure every single patient and service user has an exceptional experience with us.
Job responsibilities
The ME service will consider and respond to three key issues:
* The cause of death to ensure that it is recorded accurately on the MCCD, minimising the potential for the registrar to decline to issue a certificate of death due to inappropriate descriptions.
* Whether the death needs to be reported to the coroner, reducing inappropriate referrals and improving timeliness when a referral is required.
* Any clinical governance issues related to the death; early review of patient notes and discussions with relatives allow timely identification of potential significant incident investigations.
Qualifications
* Educated to Bachelor's Degree level or equivalent working knowledge in a related field.
* Successful completion of the MEO core training modules of the national online training curriculum prior to undertaking case record reviews as an MEO.
Experience and Knowledge
* Experience of working with people in sensitive and emotional situations.
* Experience of working in a healthcare environment with multi‑disciplinary teams across organisational boundaries.
* Experience of applying principles of Quality Improvement.
* Experience of undertaking clinical case note reviews as part of Mortality and Morbidity or Serious Incident processes.
Other Requirements
* It is an essential requirement that the post holder has a valid driving licence and is either a car owner and able to use the car for work purposes, or has a Trust personal lease vehicle which may be used for the role. The Trust would consider making reasonable adjustments to the role, if necessary, to enable a disabled person to undertake the role.
Disclosure and Barring Service Check
This post is subject to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (Exceptions Order) 1975 and as such it will be necessary for a submission for Disclosure to be made to the Disclosure and Barring Service (formerly known as CRB) to check for any previous criminal convictions.
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