Too many autopsies, not enough workers

Medical examiner’s office works to fill jobs as deaths fuel need for more staff

The Maryland medical examiner’s office is scrambling to fill persistent and new vacancies that are threatening its ability to handle a crushing load of cases stemming from the long-running opioid epidemic and a stubbornly high pace of homicides in Baltimore.

Compounding the problem, the state’s longtime and well-regarded chief medical examiner left the office at the end of 2019, citing the challenges the office faces in coping with the overdose crisis. An assistant is serving as acting chief examiner while a search is made.

The workload of the office, located in Baltimore, has exceeded national quality standards for years and could get worse given recent departures. And the office is again at risk of losing its accreditation.

With the retirement of the chief examiner and the departure of several assistants, the office has 16 examiners and needs to hire four more. It hasn’t had so few examiners in five years.

“It’s a crisis,” said state Del. Maggie McIntosh, chair of the House Appropriations Committee. “The bottom line is that we have several agencies or units within agencies that are stressed because of staffing shortages, and this is one,” she said. “It’s going to take this administration and the legislature to sit down and figure out how to resolve it.”

The examiner’s office is part of the state Department of Health, which says it has increased salaries to recruit and retain examiners, though its pay still lags behind competing agencies. After a Baltimore Sun report in 2017 about the workload, health officials added three positions. New examiners were hired eventually, but departures in the office have outpaced new arrivals.

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