Gambling with Lives suggested that another way of collating statistics about the numbers of gambling-related suicides might be through changes to medical recording and the coronial process.

It is not, and never has been, part of the duties of coroners to record the reason for a death; they have always been limited to discovering “who, when, where and how”, but not “why” a person died; indeed there is a statutory prohibition on such a finding https://www.onlinecasinoitaliani.com/recensioni/voglia-di-vincere/.

There is a good reason for this: “why” often involves deciding that a criminal offence has been committed, often with an indication of the likely perpetrator, and this would impact on the criminal process and might prejudice a fair trial. But the result is that a finding that a death was the result of suicide will not say that the suicide was caused in whole or in part by gambling, even if the coroner believes that this was the case. Coroners’ offices therefore have no record of gambling-related suicides.

Until 1 October 2019 doctors were under no formal duty to notify a coroner of a person’s death or, if they did, to include any particular information. On that day new Regulations came into force, the Notification of Deaths Regulations 2019,341 which were made under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009.

Regulation 3(1) requires doctors to notify senior coroners in writing of any death where the doctor “suspects that [a] person’s death was due to … self-harm”. Regulation 4 lists the details of the information a doctor is required to supply, including the circumstances which apply to the death (such as self-harm).

Doctors must provide any further information they consider to be relevant, and could therefore state that they believe the death from self-harm was gambling-related; but they are not under an obligation to do so. If they were required to do so, each of the 88 coroners’ offices would accumulate a record of the deaths where doctors suspect that the death was gambling-related. These records could be collated by the Ministry of Justice.