Body mix-up sees Buri Ram Hospital issue apology

BURI RAM: Buri Ram Hospital executives yesterday apologised for delivering the wrong dead body to family members of deceased 47-year-old Um Taoteethong.

Rakkiat Prasongdee, deputy director of the hospital, said his staff had failed to ask relatives of Um and Lamom Insamran, 75, a resident of Ban Alang in Ban Dan district, who died on the same day at the hospital in Muang district, to verify the bodies.

The mistake was not discovered until Lamom’s body reached the province’s Wat Palad Puk when undertakers at the temple opened a cloth in which the body was wrapped to prepare a bathing rite for Lamom — and realised the body was not hers.

Hospital director Somchai Assawasudsakorn yesterday said the hospital will reiterate the correct procedures to staff to prevent it happening again.

Family and friends of Um were perplexed on Thursday night when they saw an ambulance rushing to the chanting ceremony for the 47-year-old at her house at Ban Non Malai in Khu Muang district.

Volunteers from the rescue unit of the Tambon Wang Nuea Administration Organisation emerged from the ambulance with some unexpected news: the body lying in the coffin was not Um — and they had come to deliver the real one.

“The ambulance from the Tambon Wang Nuea Administration Organisation came to the house around 7pm and told me that they wanted to swap the bodies,” said Saksa Taoteethong, the elder brother of the dead woman. “I was shocked. I opened the coffin at the ceremony and found that the body was not my sister’s.”

Um’s body was moved from the ambulance to replace Lamom’s, which the ambulance then delivered to a chanting ceremony at Wat Palad Puk.

Um and Lamom both died on Thursday, and their bodies were moved to the hospital morgue. Staff then cleaned them, injected them with formalin and wrapped them in sheets of white cloth in preparation for collection by their families for religious ceremonies.

It was Phisit Insamran, a son of Lamom, who alerted the hospital to the error when he called asking for the correct body to be delivered.

“I was lucky,” Mr Phisit said. “Had the undertakers not opened the cloth wrapped around the body, I would have cremated a woman who was not my mother.”

Mr Phisit said that when he and other family members arrived at the hospital morgue on Thursday, they were told all verification processes had been completed for the release.

After learning of the mistake, Dr Rakkiat said the hospital hastily contacted the rescue unit to swap the bodies.