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Death notifications can be some of the hardest conversations you will ever have. The emotional toll on you and the surviving family can be forever engraved in your mind. How you make the notification is vital to the grieving process and can carry legal and moral responsibilities to you and your agency. This course will cover the best practices in making a death notification.
Who Should Take This Course
- Law Enforcement Officers
- Law Enforcement Supervisors
- Coroners and Medicolegal Investigators
- First Responders, EMS and Fire Personnel
- Interested Students
Course Summary
This course is approved for 1 hour of continuing education credits by Missouri POST and the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators (ABMDI)
Death notifications can be some of the hardest conversations you will ever have. The emotional toll on you and the surviving family can be forever engraved in your mind. How you make the notification is vital to the grieving process and can carry legal and moral responsibilities to you and your agency. This course will cover the best practices in making a death notification.
Four key aspects of proper death notification are ‘In-Person, In-Time, In-Paris and In-Plain Language’. This course will cover these aspects as well as; ensuring proper decedent identification, locating proper next-of-kin, and the proper steps in notifying surviving family in the workplace.
Done incorrectly, death notifications can lead to civil liability for your department as well as yourself. This course will guide you through the most common areas of mistakes in the notification process.
This is an online video training and is designed to be interactive with students by random quizzes and a final exam. Student login and time are tracked per student to verify the time spent in the course if needed. Testing cannot be done until the videos are watched. Many of the videos have a unique symbol or picture that will appear prominently in the video and is part of the test questions, this will ensure the video has been watched. Certificates will only be available for print after the successful completion of the course material.
Each certificate will indicate that it was an online training and will note the approval control number and the CLEE hours given.
Course Objectives
At the completion of this course, participants will be able to
- Explain how Law Enforcement face certain obstacles in death notifications
- Properly identify the four basic keys of death notification
- Properly explain why it is critical to mak a notification in person
- Properly explain why it is important to notify in a timely manner
- Properly explain why it is important to notify in pairs
- Explain what information should be decided upon prior to notification
- Explain how to notify in plain language and why it’s important
- Explain why “vague language” is not used and what to say instead.
- Explain how to handle victim property – when and how to release
- Explain proper procedures for notifying survivors in the workplace
- Explain the legal liabilities of notifications
