Family of man who succumbed to Covid-19 at pvt hospital in Doon, discovers they had been given the wrong body during cremation | Dehradun News - Times of India
Dehradun: The family of a 59-year-old Covid-19 patient who died Thursday morning at Doon’s Kailash Hospital, was given the wrong body by the hospital, which they realised only halfway through the cremation process as protocol does not allow the deceased’s body to be uncovered outside the hospital. Sanjay Shankhyadhar, a city-based lawyer, whose brother Sanjeev Shankhyadhar had died after battling the disease for 15 days at the hospital, alleged that the hospital had denied the patient proper treatment. While hospital authorities dismissed the allegations of medical negligence, they admitted to the goof-up, saying it was an “inadvertent mistake” to hand over the wrong body.
Talking to TOI, Shankhyadhar said, “My brother and his wife both tested positive for the coronavirus around two weeks ago. Initially my brother was doing well and did not need an ICU or ventilator. However, his condition later deteriorated and he had to be shifted to the ICU.”
“When visiting him, I saw hospital staff dumping used PPE kits in bins placed right next to patients’ beds. Also, when we got to know that the hospital did not have an expert pulmonologist to treat my brother’s increasing respiratory distress, we requested the hospital to let us have an expert from outside visit him but we were refused. He finally died on Thursday but the agony didn’t end there. First we got the wrong body. Then we were denied a death receipt at the mortuary, as the staff said it had gone missing,” he added.
The deceased’s son, Pratyush, told TOI, “Before the cremation, we were only allowed to see his eyes. It was when the body was uncovered for cremation that we realised it was not my father. When we confronted the ambulance driver, he told me I was unable to recognise the body as it had decomposed.”
When the family insisted that the body on the pyre was that of a stranger’s, the hospital sent them a photo of the other body in the morgue and it turned out to be the right one. “After we protested, my father’s body was sent to the cremation ground by the hospital in another ambulance. All we got was an apology,” Pratyush added.
Pawan Sharma, owner of Kailash Hospital, said that contrary to the family’s allegations, the patient had been given the best possible treatment and Dr Jagdish Rawat, a pulmonologist, had examined him. As for the body goof-up, Sharma said “it was an inadvertent error and we have apologised to the family”.
“I personally travelled to the cremation ground to apologise for the mistake,” Sharma said.