Hospital Mortuary / Autopsy Unit

An updated revision of HPU 490 Hospital Mortuary / Autopsy Unit (Revision 7, July 2020) has been uploaded. The revised version has been informed by an extensive consultation process with clinical and technical experts.

Key changes to the document include:

• body viewing areas within the mortuary are noted as optional depending on local jurisdictional policies with some facilities moving towards operational models whereby the viewing function occurs on the clinical unit;
• description of the trend towards centralisation of both coronial and non-coronial autopsy services to a small number of facilities across a jurisdiction;
• inclusion of information relating to medical imaging given imaging modalities are increasingly being used to support autopsies and where appropriate, enables the cause of death to be determined by external examination only; 
• emphasis on the need to consider local cultural requirements;
• updates to the section relating to organ tissue retention and disposal;
• updates to the section on instrument cleaning and processing;
• description of staff workflows within the autopsy units in line with the recommended area allocations and updated standard components to support separation of clean and dirty flows throughout the unit;
• updates to the schedule of accommodation to align with contemporary operational practices;
• benchmarking of the ‘mortuary – cool store’ area to recently delivered mortuaries; and
• identification of ‘optional’ rooms and inclusion of these at the end of the SOA to avoid them being allocated by default. The requirement for each optional area should be confirmed on a project by project basis.