Digital systems in Prevention of Future Deaths reports
This evidence map and thematic case synthesis examines how electronic records, interoperability, digital workflows and health-IT design appear in England and Wales Prevention of Future Deaths (PFD) reports—and what those reports may mean for safer military health-information systems.
Current evidence boundary
The current pass logged 87 retained candidates, included and fully extracted 71 reports, and excluded 16. It combines complete enumeration and extraction of the 2018 publication cohort with 36 retained cohort decisions, targeted 2019–2026 discovery and a limited later-migration check. The other 343 cohort rows lack retained contextual dispositions, so the review is not exhaustive, systematic or epidemiological. Counts overlap because reports can receive several codes; one included PFD covers three deaths.
Choose a route
| If you need to… | Start here |
|---|---|
| Find a report, system, setting or hazard | Browse all included reports |
| Understand recurring digital safety mechanisms | Read the findings synthesis |
| Translate the evidence for DPHC or Programme CORTISONE | Open the Defence application |
| Audit how reports were found, selected and coded | Review methods and assurance |
| Use a conference-ready derivative | Open research outputs |
What the current review shows
- Presence is not delivery. Information may exist electronically without reaching the accountable clinician or entering the workflow used for care.
- Filing and acknowledgement are not completion. Results, messages and recommendations need ownership, deadlines, escalation and clinical closure.
- Interoperability includes identity, semantics and workflow. Successful transport alone does not ensure that the correct record, meaning or action reaches the receiving team.
- Representations create hidden work. Paper–electronic boundaries, exports and ordinary views can omit prompts, amendments or richer source information.
- Configurable safeguards can become optional safety. Alerts and decision support need representative testing, monitoring and protection during migration.
These are thematic observations within the included corpus, not estimates of frequency or product-level comparative safety.
Evidence-to-action chain
flowchart LR
A[Primary source] --> B[Included report record]
B --> C[Traceable claim]
C --> D[Hazard mechanism]
D --> E[Candidate Defence requirement]
E --> F[Assurance test]Every downstream interpretation should remain traceable to the source record and visibly distinguish coronial concern, recipient account, reviewer coding and Defence analogy.
Review status
- Corpus coverage: current pass; 71 included reports from 87 retained candidates, with complete 2018 publication-cohort enumeration/extraction, 36 retained cohort decisions, targeted 2019–2026 discovery and a limited later-migration check.
- Search dates: targeted 2019–2026 pass on 14 July 2026; bounded 2018 publication-cohort audit on 15 July 2026. Last evidence integration: 15 July 2026.
- Next release gates: rerun to the closing date, independent coding/source-lineage check and resolution of the ICMM submission deadline.
- Known limitation: complete Judiciary webpage full-text search is consistently available only for reports published from 1 January 2023; earlier retrieval needs additional search routes.
See what changed and the validation queue for open work.