FENTANYL CRISIS PROMPTS FUNERAL HOME PRECAUTIONS
As a fentanyl crisis ravages B.C., funeral parlours are being advised to stock naloxone kits to reverse possible overdoses among mourners at services or staff who handle bodies of overdose victims.
The B.C. Funeral Association sent a bulletin to members in early November explaining the importance of carrying the kits, as the province battles a public health emergency brought on by a sharp rise in drug deaths this year, executive director Charlotte Poncelet said.
“It should be something that you just do,” Poncelet said.
Services may be attended by people who use drugs and having a naloxone kit on hand will make staff better prepared to assist in the event someone overdoses during a service, she said.
When any death occurs, friends and family are in “a vulnerable po- sition,” so if they have a tendency to use drugs to cope with emotional circumstances, the risk of an overdose may increase, Poncelet said.
The association is also concerned staff who handle the deceased, such as embalmers, may come into contact with trace amounts of fentanyl left undiscovered on personal items or on a body, a concern for first responders as well.
“Our focus, from the association’s standpoint, is making sure that our member funeral homes are educated on what to do where you maybe don’t know how they passed away, or you do and you are needing to be aware of residual fentanyl.”
In the first 10 months of 2016, 622 people died of illicit drug overdose in B.C., with about 60 per cent of those deaths linked to fentanyl.
Meanwhile, B.C. funeral workers are helping more families through the devastation of overdose death.
Valerie Martell, funeral home manager at the Martin Brothers Funeral Chapels in Vancouver, said families aren’t required to divulge cause of death, but often staff will learn what happened from information provided by a coroner when the body is delivered.
“We’ve had quite a few young people die recently,” Martell said. “We’ve been dealing with these deaths and when their parents or next of kin come to us ... many of them are not saying exactly what it is.”
Martell said she is often hearing “it was just a tragic, sudden death.”
“But we have, throughout the process, found out that many of these have been fentanyl deaths or related to an overdose.”
Martell said it seems stigma around drug use prevents some of the tight-knit families the chapel serves from sharing. Often, deaths come as a complete surprise to families — someone with a fulltime job will die from an overdose while using drugs recreationally.
“This is a whole different beast,” she said. “We’ve heard these things before — when people die of overdoses all the time — but nothing concentrated like this, that I recall.”
Lorraine Fracy, president of the B.C. Funeral Association and operations manager at the Royal Oak Burial Park in Victoria, said seven families have had services for an overdose victim at the cemetery in the past two weeks.
During her 16 years in the industry she’s noticed families are more open about drug use, perhaps because the cemetery works with families later in the process.
She estimates Royal Oak has done dozens of services for overdose victims in the past year. Some families may not have known their loved one was using drugs and many have been non-entrenched, recreational users, as young as 16 and as old as 60, she said.
“Any time you’ve got an unexpected death, it’s really traumatizing on the family. We just have to make sure that we’re nurturing, that we’ve done enough to be able to nurture them through the transition.”