There is an increasing rise in abandoned corpses found in public hospitals as family members sometimes abandon their loved ones after spending so much on their health, while some are unidentified citizens who were taken off the street.
Some of the persons abandoned in the hospital who have been unclaimed include; mentally challenged people, armed robbers who were brought in by security operatives, accident victims and many others.
A general survey of the situation shows that in Cross River state, over 1,000 unclaimed corpses are currently in the public mortuaries, while University of Calabar Teaching Hospital had so many corpses, that in 2013 over 200 were buried for lack of space.
Apart from accident victims, the bulk of corpses were abandoned by dubious relatives who provided fake contact addresses after depositing the dead bodies, it was learnt.
A private mortician operating in Ikom Local Government Area of the state, Mr. Emeka Ben-Chima, decried the health risk constituted by the high number of corpses abandoned in mortuaries across the state.
Ben-Chima said that over 300 corpses had been left unclaimed in his mortuary and others for several years with some deposited as far back as 2010.
He said, “Some of the dead bodies are from Akwa Ibom and neighbouring states. Others are from Cameroon and Cross River State, which were deposited by people who said they were their relatives but they failed to collect them after many years. We tried to trace the addresses they gave us but discovered that those addresses were fake and the phone numbers they gave too were fake.”
Unlike the cases of UCTH and the General Hospital in Calabar, Ben-Chima said he was afraid of burying the bodies in a mass grave because the owners of the corpses might appear some day to demand for the bodies of their relatives.
In Ekiti State for instance, the situation has become so bad that the state government announced over the radio one week ago that families who had unclaimed corpses in the government hospitals in the state should come for them immediately as the situation had become worse.
Raising an alarm over the situation in the mortuary of the Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital, Ado Ekiti, the Chief Medical Director, Dr. Kolawole Ogundipe, said that unclaimed corpses in the mortuary had become a threat to the smooth running of the facility.
Ogundipe said such unclaimed bodies had occupied the available space in the mortuary and was impeding service delivery.
In a similar case, a spokesperson for the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu, Mr. Cyril Keleze, said the situation in the facility’s mortuary had become so bad that morticians who maintain the bodies were now finding it difficult to manage because of the congestion.
“In this kind of situation, we’ll get the permission of the government to go ahead and bury such corpses in order to decongest the mortuary,” Keleze said.
In Oyo State, a health worker at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the situation as a constant worry for the management of the hospital’s mortuary.
The alarming situation has become an issue of concern after it was realised that families who could not afford the hospital bills, mostly abandoned their loved ones.
According to a health worker at the University College Hospital in Ibadan, he said,
“The law says that operators of public mortuaries must place advertisements in a major newspaper two or three times before classifying bodies as abandoned corpses. After the first advertisement, you have to wait for certain number of days before placing a reminder, after which you can go ahead and dispose the bodies. Sometimes, a third reminder may be necessary depending on the number of the corpses involved.
“The management of UCH placed advertisements in the newspapers to announce that there were abandoned corpses in the hospital mortuary. There were few responses but many bodies still had to be disposed. There have been two batches of such disposal this year but I cannot verify the number of corpses involved. Without conducting such exercise, the mortuary would be crowded and unhygienic.”
In various government hospitals, the situation is also the same as the hospitals had to organise mass burials for unclaimed corpses.
In some other cases, the family members end up dropping fake numbers or the relations of the deceased will be unreachable and their contacts are sometimes switched off or unavailable.
The situation is the same in Osun State where the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology Teaching Hospital in Osogbo had to organise a mass burial for some unclaimed corpses last week.
In Kwara State, hospital authorities are finding it difficult to track down many of the relations of the deceased as the contact numbers of many of them have remained switched off.
The Director-General, Kwara State Hospitals Management Bureau, Dr. Olubunmi Jetawo-Winter, said in an attempt to find a solution to the issue, the hospital management had notified the Ministry of Justice and the Kwara State Police Command to help track down the families. But in the meantime, she said the bureau would continue to make public announcements.