This project has been funded by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, and involved the development of a standard form for police around Australia to use when reporting a death to the coroner. Previously, each state and territory had their own individual forms, which collected varying levels and types of information about each death

The original scope of the project was to capture additional information concerning water related fatalities, however the proposed police form data set soon expanded to include extra information about drug and alcohol deaths (as part of the Drugs Module Project) and additional information about a range of other types of death.

A standard template form was developed in consultation with pathologists, coroners, researchers, police and other stakeholders. An example of the template form can be viewed here. The form is intended to be completed electronically by police, and emailed to the relevant coroners office. Macro’s have since been incorporated into the form so only relevant sections pertaining to the type of death in each case are presented.

The development of a national police form should hopefully result in collection of extra information by the police at the initial investigation of a fatality, which will benefit pathologists and coroners. At a later stage, this additional information will also benefit government agencies and other researchers. A national data set will also result in the standardisation of information that is provided to a coroner by police.

To assess its practical feasibility, a pilot of the national police form was performed in Victoria in 2003, using a regional and rural police station. The results from the pilot were generally favourable, with some additional technical enhancements to the form made as a result of feedback.

The decision to implement the national police form in each State and Territory has to be made by each relevant jurisdiction, and to date, a version of the national form has been implemented in Northern Territory, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania. It is expected the form will be implemented in Victoria shortly, and investigations are being undertaken in NSW concerning its implementation. A more detailed assessment of the progress of implementation of the national form in each of the states and territories is available here.

Next steps:

The next steps for the project are to investigate the feasibility of automatically extracting the information collected from the national police form into fields on the NCIS so as to allow searching on this extra information.