St. Joseph Orthopedic Hospital to undertake mass burial for unidentified dead bodies

The management of the St. Joseph Hospital at Koforidua Effiduase in the New Juaben North Municipality of the Eastern Region has announced its intention to carry out a mass burial for eight unclaimed bodies that have been in the Hospital’s morgue since 2018.

This was disclosed by the Hospital’s Administrator, Mr. Philemon Quansah, in an interview with a GBC Sunrise FM reporter.

According to Mr. Quansah, two of the said unidentified bodies were brought to the morgue by the Koforidua Central Police while the remaining six bodies were deposited by the Koforidua Effiduase Police.

He said the exercise will be carried out by the middle of this month, in collaboration with the Ghana Police Service and the Environmental Protection Agency, if the bodies remain unclaimed to make way for a scheduled renovation at the mortuary.

“So we have two mortuaries and then in we came out with a memo in October that people should not bring any external bodies and then those who unfortunately were in the facility, the directive was that the bodies should not be kept for more than two weeks simply because, the other morgue that we have can contain a limited number of bodies so we didn’t want the situation whereby that small one will be full and we will be forced to take some bodies to the one we want to renovate.

So even though we want to carry out the renovation exercise, we gave a directive in October that there should be no external bodies so we make do with the smaller one that can contain a minimum number of bodies. So, we still have a backup, just that the backup is not that big and it’s full.

Mr. Quansah indicated that this move has become necessary after all attempts to trace the relatives of the dead bodies proved futile.

He, therefore, appealed to the general public, especially those whose relatives have gone missing for the past years to contact the pathology department of the Hospital for identification to forestall a situation whereby such bodies are added to those earmarked for mass burial.

The Hospital’s Administrator also encouraged members of the general public to cultivate the habit of always carrying their ID Cards or other forms of identification on them to help identify them in case they are involved in an accident or any health crises.