Hospital officials give unclaimed corpses' relatives 14-day time limit before mass burial. Image Via Witness
Morticians who work for the Osun State University Teaching Hospital, mortuary department, have informed the management of rising numbers of unclaimed bodies.
The University officials also, due to the owners unwillingness to come forward to identify and retrieve the unclaimed bodies, issued a 14-day grace before they are disposed of.
They gave the relatives who have corpses in the mortuary 14 days, unit of the hospital between January 2019 and June 2023 to come and retrieve them.
The hospital said it is going to arrange a mass burial for all the unclaimed bodies after 14-day period elapses.
The management’s statement released in Osogbo on Saturday stated, “The management of UNIOSUN Teaching Hospital, Osogbo wishes to inform the general public that the hospital’s mortuary is presently congested and crowded with unclaimed bodies.
“In view of this development, the management hereby calls on relatives who have corpses in the mortuary unit of the hospital between January 2019 and June 2023 to come and retrieve them within 14 days of this announcement,” the management said.
“It should be noted that the management will resort to mass burial of all unclaimed bodies after 14 days of this announcement as an alternative to decongest the mortuary.”
This was contained in a statement signed by the Public Relations Officer of the medical centre, Miss Esther Bature, and made available to newsmen in the Keffi Local Government Area of the state.
According to Bature, the decision by the management of the medical centre to issue the deadline was because some of the bodies were deposited to the hospital’s mortuary between 2021 and 2022.
This number of years the unclaimed bodies have stayed in the university hospital’s mortuary have exceeded the legally authorizd time limit of six months, according to a section of the Nigerian law.
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However, in most cases, some relatives of unclaimed bodies of dead persons also avoid going to the mortuary for their corpses because of piling bills over the periods they have stayed for embalming and treatment.
