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Horrible experience at Georgetown Hospital mortuary
Dear Editor,
On September 2, 2016 I had cause to visit the GPHC mortuary to identify the body of a relative whose life left his body earlier that morning. I was horrified at the morgue. No, it wasn’t the fear of dead bodies or jumbies. I was simply shocked by the chaos! I was in the company of two other relatives and we gave the attendant the name and description of the deceased upon his request.
We stood at the entrance of the morgue as the attendant went through each refrigerator for about 15 minutes. He wore no gloves. Thank God Ebola never came to Guyana! The attendant eventually came to us and said he wasn’t finding the body. While in conversation another attendant came, along with a statelier dressed gentleman and the body search recommenced. The second attendant wore cloves. The dressed-up guy used a piece of paper as the shield between his fingers and the refrigerator handles. They still could not find the body.
I was becoming a bit agitated because we knew for a fact that the corpse was removed from the Male Medical Ward and sent to the mortuary. We also knew that the doctors had already pronounced our relative ‘dead’ so he couldn’t have gone for a stroll up New Market Street. The first attendant then went to a refrigerator, which we all thought we saw him checked before, and declared that he had found the body. We were allowed to enter the mortuary and confirmed that it was our relative’s body.
This entire process to identify a corpse by one family took almost 30 minutes. What boggled my mind were the hygienic practice and the labeling arrangement, or lack of it. Why were all workers of the morgue not properly protecting themselves with the use of latex gloves? Why weren’t the refrigerators labeled accordingly, with the name and DOB of the deceased? Why were some occupied refrigerators labeled while others were left unmarked? Is this the reason why bodies were mistakenly processed by funeral homes in the past? I had the opportunity to visit two mortuaries overseas before.
I will not make a comparison with the functional order of the one in the U.S.A, because everything is expected to be done properly in the U.S.A. There are standards that have to be complied with. But, right next door in neighbouring Suriname there is much more order. As a matter of fact, the morgue in Paramaribo is so clean, neatly furnished and organized that it compares to a supermarket. I hate to compare or be condescending towards the services in my native land, but it is what it is – CHAOS – and urgently needs fixing!
Orette Cutting
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In a country where the living is treated with at best contempt, that the dead is treated as irrelevant (unlabeled) is hardly unexpected.