Why do nurses, and in particular district nurses, accept the terminology of ‘sudden/unexpected death’ to describe all deaths which are not ‘expected’ ? Nurses presumably understand that Coroners allow the concept of ‘expected death’ to simplify post-mortem procedures, and to make things easier for the bereaved if a GP cannot attend the death.
But, although it makes sense to call the deaths Coroners allow nurses to verify on their own, it is plainly offensive to relatives to describe those earlier deaths which would quite often be promptly certified if the GP had attended the death, as ‘sudden’ or ‘unexpected’. This is a singularly annoying aspect of CPR/VoD behaviour, the failure to distinguish between the situation when a GP would be surprised to learn of the patient’s death, and the later stage when ‘the GP not be surprised by a death’: the former is properly ‘sudden’ or ‘unexpected’, but the latter, although not ‘expected’, needs a much more ‘neutral’ label than sudden !