The importance of record keeping and how redeployment helped a dental nurse to explore its use in forensic dentistry

I am a dental nurse at Croydon University Hospital and would like to share the experience and the knowledge I gained when I was redeployed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Many dentists and dental care professionals were redeployed within the NHS to aid other severely overstretched and understaffed areas of their respective trusts. I offered my help to the extremely busy mortuary department to manage the storage and paperwork of each deceased person, ensuring people's loved ones were cared for in a dignified manor during those unprecedented times.

Our trust's mortuary accepts and stores both those who died in hospital and in the community. Unfortunately, due to lockdown and family members being unable to have regular contact with each other, some people who died at home had not been found for quite some time. This sadly meant that traditional forms of identification, such as photographs, tattoos, scars, birthmarks or fingerprints, were no longer reliable.