Dead bodies lie in the open at Bolga

Families in Bolgatanga are having a hard time finding a place to put bodies of their deceased relatives as one of the two fridges at the Bolgantanga Hospital mortuary has broken down.

The only fridge serving the Hospital is taking more than its capacity and attendants fear it may also break down.

In a special report by TV3’s Odelia Ofori on News 360, the mortuary at the Hospital appears overstocked as 30 instead of 10 corpses are kept in it at a time.

In some dire circumstances, families have been made to go through the agony of waiting for days before getting space to keep the bodies of their dead relatives.

Speaking to Odelia Ofori, Paul Ayamga, a mortuary attendant, said that authorities are often confronted with fewer options than to ask relatives to send bodies to Navrongo or Tamale, the Northern Region capital.

He says sometimes families are talked to and the dead bodies are “overdosed” with formalin, an aqueous solution of the chemical compound formaldehyde used as a disinfectant.

An attempt to find out what has brought about the situation revealed that the Hospital was saddled with more life-threatening problems.

Expected to have at least 40 medical specialists, the Bolgatanga Hospital has only four specialists, who dabble in medications not in their field of specialty.

“We use physician assistants [who] ideally are not supposed to work at the regional hospital level but at the district level but because of our acute situation, we have to use them,” George Atampugre, the hospital’s administrator, told Odelia Ofori.

It is clear that if help is not sent to the hospital, more dead bodies may find their ways lying in the open, a situation that would pose health threat to the people of the Upper East Region capital.