Autopsy guidelines series
The College's autopsy guidelines enable pathologists to deal with non-forensic consent and Coroners’ post-mortem examinations to a consistently high standard. They are crucial for ensuring standardised, high-quality procedures in pathology, providing a benchmark that upholds the accuracy and reliability of autopsy results.
These autopsy guidelines are technical documents which have been written as an aid for practising pathologists carrying out a coroners or procurator fiscal post mortem. As such, this guidance may contain some distressing information and is not intended for friends and relatives of the deceased.
There is some information about post-mortems for friends and relatives on our website and the Human Tissue Authority website.
NICE has accredited the process used by The Royal College of Pathologists to produce its autopsy guidelines. Accreditation is valid for five years from 25 July 2017 and is retrospectively applicable to documents produced using the processes described in our guidance for authors.
Guidance produced following the accredited process bears the NICE accreditation mark.
More information about accreditation is available on the NICE website.
Published documents
Documents under consultation
Members can comment on draft documents here.