Umgang des Rettungsdienstes mit in der Präklinik verstorbenen Patienten

Both preservation of deceased person's dignity and immediate regaining of operational readiness are crucial for emergency medical services (EMS). In addition, investigations concerning circumstances and cause of death should not be affected by EMS actions. For cases of death before beginning of EMS transportation, legal regulations are well defined and EMS transportation of the corpse is basically prohibited. This article deals with death after onset and during ongoing EMS transportation. For this circumstance, there are no generally accepted practices in terms of law, ethics and organisation. Pragmatically continued resuscitation violates human dignity and falsifies time and place of death, and therefore must be rejected. Bavarian state law allows transport to the hospital for postmortem examination in case that the patient had deceased en route. In Saxonian state law, this procedure is even explicitly intended. Unloading the corpse without appropriate premises or in public could be considered as disturbing peace of the dead. To provide immediate restitution of EMS unit operational readiness, postmortem examination of any person deceased en route in the nearest eligible treatment facility should be generally rendered possible. However, this approach implies evolution of German state funeral laws. This article presents atransectoral conception for Bavaria and addresses the need to adapt German state laws to the needs of emergency medicine