Autopsy guidelines series

The College's autopsy guidelines enable pathologists to deal with non-forensic consent and Coroners’ or Procurator Fiscal 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.

Published documents

New briefing on COVID-19 – Autopsy practice relating to possible cases of COVID-19

This brief guidance has been produced by RCPath following the outbreak of the COVID-19 infection in China.

Documents under consultation

Members can comment on draft documents here.