Freeman Brothers was first established as a funeral director in Horsham, West Sussex, in 1855. The company now has three further offices across the county – in Billingshurst, Crawley and Hurstpierpoint – continuing to serve these varied communities with dedication and integrity. The team at Freeman Brothers is also dedicated to providing advice on funerals and funeral services free of charge and without obligation, to help educate the general public on issues that many find difficult to discuss.

It’s with this intention that Manager, Abi Pattenden, provides a brief update on a part of the funeral arranging process which has recently changed. For further context on this, you can read her original post on the topic of England and Wales’s new Medical Examiner system here.

It’s now just over two weeks since the new Medical Examiner regime was introduced in England and Wales. As we had expected, the integration of the new Medical Examiner system has not been completely smooth sailing. Having spoken to our colleagues in other organisations, such as local crematoriums, we had collated as much information as possible about how to proceed, and had ensured the Freeman Brothers team was fully aware of the requirements of each different setting, as there wasn’t an aligned approach. Sadly, at least one of these organisations had misunderstood the roll out of the regime and the information they had given us was incorrect.

The important information that impacts which set of paperwork needed to be completed relates to the death of the person concerned: when this was, when the doctor was able to complete the Medical Certificate of the Cause of Death and when the death was able to be registered. There will inevitably be a crossover period where deceased people span the ‘old’ and ‘new’ regimes and so we have been running through these circumstances when we are booking the crematorium concerned to check that we understand the correct set of paperwork to be completed. In one case, we have received conflicting answers and so completed two sets, which may have taken a little longer in the arrangement appointment, but saved the Applicant needing to return to us to complete the correct set if we had taken the wrong advice.

The local Medical Examiner’s office seems to be processing the paperwork relatively quickly and, because appointments will only be made to register once this has happened, we should see fewer delays in this part of the process because Registration Services has certainty that the person making the appointment has the required documentation- where before, people were making anticipatory appointments and then cancelling them too late for someone else to use them.

We will have to wait and see how long it takes for the system to become fully integrated into ways of working but, although the initial process hasn’t been as smooth as it could be, the early signs are encouraging.

At the time of writing, the latest information via the National Association of Funeral Directors regarding this issue could be found here. Should any further updates on the topic become available, we will endeavour to share this via our blog as soon as possible and, as always, contact any impacted customers individually.

If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch.