Hong Kong mortuary staff rapped for keeping loss of dead baby quiet

Jan 7, 2009, 5:25 GMT

   Hong Kong - Mortuary workers at a Hong Kong public hospital were sharply criticized by a top health official Wednesday for failing to report the loss of a dead baby boy for three days.

   Under Secretary for Health Gabriel Leung said it was not acceptable that police and hospital authorities were informed on Monday about the disappearance of the baby who was lost last Friday.

   Mortuary staff at Hong Kong's Eastern Hospital are understood to have spent a weekend frantically searching for the baby boy's body before informing hospital management and police on Monday.

   The family of the boy, who died after being delivered prematurely on December 15, were only informed that the body was missing on Tuesday after a Chinese-language newspaper reported the blunder.

   Leung said Wednesday: 'The delay in reporting by mortuary staff to management of the hospital is not acceptable. Our priority now is to cooperate fully with the police investigations.

   'We must try to locate the body of the child, understand how this has come about and look at the system to see if there should be (improvements) ... to prevent a similar occurrence.'

   The baby's body reportedly went missing after being placed in a refrigerated container at the morgue along with the body of an obese man who was released for cremation on December 19.

   Staff at the funeral home where the man was cremated deny seeing the baby boy and police were reportedly investigating whether the baby may have been thrown out with rubbish and ended up in a land-fill site.

   The blunder comes in the same week that another Hong Kong public hospital admitted serious errors in failing to send medics to treat a dying man who collapsed on the hospital's doorstep.

   The receptionist told the man's father to dial for an ambulance, refusing even to ring the emergency services number for him. The 56-year-old man died later.