Saline County Coroner Selected for National Board

Saline County coroner named to national advisory board

Story and Photo by Holland Doran AAC Communications Staff

Saline County Coroner and Arkansas Coroners’ Association President Kevin Cleghorn was recently named to the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators (ABMDI) Advisory Council.

“It’s very humbling, very nerve-racking, and very scary and exciting all at the same time,” he said.

Cleghorn will serve a one-year term and will attend his first council meeting in October.

He joins 19 other coroners, medical examiners and death investigation experts in lending his field experience and knowledge to promoting the highest standards for medicolegal death investigators.

“My job will be reviewing the national standards for death investigation that the ABMDI testing procedure isbased on,” he said. “It’s our responsibility to assure that the testing procedure and information included is up-todate and accurate with the current curriculum being taught across the country.”

The way deaths are recorded varies state by state. The majority of states have medical examiners offices that send investigators or doctors to a death scene. Arkansas, however, relies on coroners to actually do the hands-on work in the field.

Because of this, Cleghorn has the unique opportunity to bring a fresh perspective to the council.

“I will be adding a new perspective to that because we (coroners) are the ones going out,” he said. “We don’t have people that do it for us. So, it gives them (council members) a new perspective as to how things are done.”

Cleghorn will be a voice not only for Arkansas coroners, but also for states that have the same reporting system as Arkansas.

“I’m going to be the voice for several other states that have systems very similar to ours that have never had that kind of voice on the board before,” he said.

Now that he is influencing coroner training on the national level, Cleghorn expects coroners and deputy coroners will be encouraged to take advantage of Arkansas Medicolegal Death Investigators (ARMDI) training opportunities, and to embrace Arkansas’ new death investigation reporting system called MDILog, a program that helps coroners more accurately report deaths.

Cleghorn said nearly half of the state’s coroners — around 42-43 — have MDILog credentials. He hopes to see this number grow in the coming year as more coroners are trained in the program.

Cleghorn has been Saline County coroner since 2015 and was elected Arkansas Coroners’ Association president in 2016. He is a licensed forensic death investigator, an ABMDI diplomat, state-licensed paramedic and national registered paramedic. He is director of the South Central Region of the Infant and Child Death Review Committee and a member of the Arkansas Coroners’ Association’s inaugural Education Development Committee. He also serves on the AAC Board of Directors.

ABMDI is a voluntary national, not-for-profit, independent professional certification board that has been established to promote the highest standards of practice for medicolegal death investigators.