Pretoria - Tshwane state mortuary employees have painted a bleak picture of operations, saying bodies were piling up and some were rotting because of extended stays in the cold rooms as unnatural deaths in the city have increased.
Staff shortages, incompetent investigators, and a lack of supervision are being blamed for the dire situation. Staff say compromised infection control is also putting their lives in danger.
The law stipulates that a body be stored in a refrigerator for no more than 30 days. If it was not claimed it has to be put into a freezer. But one worker said: “Once they exceed 30 days and are exposed to the constant opening and closing of cold room doors, they become rancid, making the place unbearable.”
One Pretoria forensic pathologist, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution, said some bodies were brought into the mortuaries already decomposing. If they were kept for months before being claimed, or a pauper’s burial, they became “horrible”, he said.
With ongoing renovations at the Ga-Rankuwa morgue storage facilities, bodies were allowed to pile up on the floor while being registered and processed.
“Because we have nowhere else to put them, we leave them on top of each other,” he said.
Cold rooms, he said, could hold about 40 bodies, but sometimes they were stuffed with up to 80 bodies as post-mortems were conducted, investigations carried out and identification awaited.
A mortuary assistant placed the blame at the door of investigating officers. One file could be handed from one officer to another, with no results. “They drag their feet, or just put the file aside, which means the district surgeon and courts must wait and so must families anxious to bury their dead. And so we must also wait with a body whose status we do not know,” the assistant, who also asked not to be named, said. This also meant a delay in pauper’s burials, especially if they were linked to a crime.
Blaming a lack of supervision for operations often grinding to a halt, another morgue employee said: “We struggle a lot with incomplete cases. Investigators are largely to blame but so are the supervisors responsible for making sure all processes are running.”
Supervisors, he said, had to make sure bodies were admitted and registered, and if not claimed within seven days, fingerprints taken and an investigation started.
“The supervisor should pick up the weak link in the chain, but because they are not vigilant everything grinds to a halt,” he said.
The piling up of bodies, said the National Education Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu), also led to unnecessary exposure of workers to diseases.
Media liaison officer Sizwe Pamla said the deployment of ANC cadres to senior management positions meant the interests of workers were not prioritised. Among the problems faced by mortuary workers was infection control.
“These were poorly, if ever, enforced, and this left workers exposed to ‘frightening’ illnesses,” he said.
Staff said they often went for long periods without enough disposable aprons, gloves, razors and medical consumables, which put their lives at great risk.
The Gauteng Health Department failed to respond while the SAPS declined to comment on claims of investigators’ role in body pile-ups.
Pretoria News