THUNDER BAY – Funeral professionals being advised to not enter hospitals or long-term care facilities to remove bodies may have to wait a few days before the policy can be implemented at Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre.
Dr. Stewart Kennedy, who heads the COVID-19 response team at the hospital, said while the plan is to adhere to the nine-day-old expedited death response, they still need time to put it in place.
According to the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, funeral professionals have been advised to inform hospitals to wait outside, but if they have absolutely no alternative but to enter the facility, to ensure the hospital provides them with proper personal protective equipment.
However, they’ve also been cautioned to expect the change to take time, given the size of most hospitals in Ontario.
Kennedy said they’ve received the direction from Ontario Health, and said in the interim, funeral professionals have nothing to fear by entering the hospital at this time.
It was never going to happen overnight.
“We get probably 15 directives each day that come through to make sure we comply with the rules. Each directive does not have to happen that day to put something in place. It’s not easy to change the policies and procedures we have with anything in the hospital,” Kennedy said.
“Certainly we want to make sure we take care of the living and we want to take care of the unfortunate people who have deceased. But it takes time to put policies in place to move things along.”
Kennedy said the hospital has been providing funeral professionals with the required protective equipment to ensure their safety at the facility.
“They come to the back door, they change into PPE, they come into the morgue and they help our morgue attendant put the body on their stretcher and they take the body out, fully protected and fully safe, and fully screened,” Kennedy said.
“From our perspective, that process allowed us to work and to follow the rules outlined by the BAO as we were able to put something in place.”
Kennedy said the hospital requires extra staff and new policies and a planning team is working on how to implement it.
“It takes resources and it takes more personnel. Right now we have a lot of personnel doing screening. We have a lot of personnel hall monitoring. We have a lot of personnel redeployed in other areas of the hospital. I just can’t grab them off the streets because they have to be trained,” Kennedy said.
“People don’t realize that you have to protect your employees too. Having somebody come in dealing with a deceased body, it takes a special person to do that.”
Staff must be trained how to lift a body and how to use the specially designed stretchers employed by funeral homes.
“We’ve got to go through occupational assessments, we’ve got to go through cleaning assessments. We’ve got to go through housekeeping. There’s a whole procedure, it’s not just having an extra body to bring a deceased body to the back door.”
