deathlessons.org, rebuilt — and three new ways to use the data

5 July 2026

deathlessons.org makes the UK's coroner Prevention of Future Death reports full-text searchable. We've just rebuilt it from the ground up — and it turns out a lot was missing.

When a coroner in England and Wales believes a death reveals a risk that could cause other deaths, they must write a Prevention of Future Death (PFD) report. These reports are a remarkable public record of things that went wrong and could be put right. But they're published as individual PDFs, which makes them very hard to search across. That's the gap this site fills.

What changed

The old index had quietly gone stale and incomplete. The rebuild re-fetched and re-indexed every published report:

• From ~970 to more than 13,900 documents. A search for asthma now returns nearly 80 reports; before the rebuild it found six.
• Scanned reports recovered with OCR. Around 4,500 older reports were image-only PDFs with no searchable text at all. They're now readable and searchable.
• Thousands of broken links fixed. Many report links pointed at pages that no longer existed; each now resolves to the correct judiciary.uk page.
• A reports-only default. The index also includes the agency responses to reports; a toggle lets you include or exclude them, so a search returns the death reports by default.

Three new ways to use the data

Alongside the free search, we now offer paid services for people who work with this data at scale — researchers, journalists, safety teams and legal professionals:

• Bulk dataset — the cleaned, OCR'd, de-duplicated, metadata-tagged corpus as a single file, ready for analysis.
• Saved-query alerts — an email whenever a newly published report matches a term you care about: a drug, a device, a hospital, a hazard.
• Bespoke analysis — we answer a specific question across the whole corpus and write it up.

You can see the plans here. Everything is built on public data; you're paying for the cleaning, the compilation, and the monitoring.

Why it matters

PFD reports only prevent future deaths if the right people can find them. A coroner in Leeds has no easy way to know that a coroner in Cornwall raised the same concern three years ago — unless the reports are searchable together. That's what we're for.

Try a search →