29 July,2010 09:19 AM IST | | Alifiya Khan
Hospital dean denies water shortage at Sassoon; blames police for procedural delay in postmortems
You can't stress more on how important water is to human beings. Not justu00a0 the living, to the dead to.
The water shortage in the city has claimed a most unexpected victim ufffd dead bodies at the Sassoon Hospital morgue. On Tuesday night, at least two post-mortems were delayed and families had to wait the entire night as hospital officials claimed there was no water to "splash on the dead bodies".
The term 'splashing' is hospital jargon that refers to cleansing of dead bodies before and after a post-mortem is conducted.
As grief-stricken relatives of Hadapsar resident Mahesh Bhosle (34), who committed suicide on Tuesday night, took his body to the Sassoon Hospital morgue for a post-mortem examination, little did they know that they'd be put through an agonising wait of over eight hours.
Officials at the morgue said Bhosle's post-mortem could not be conducted until Wednesday morning due to water shortage.
Agonising wait
"Though we had taken the body to the hospital morgue by 10 pm on Tuesday, we were told to come the next morning after 5 am," said an official from Hadapsar police station who had gone to the hospital for the autopsy report. "The delay in the police investigation is one thing, imagine the trauma for the family members who are already in a bad state of mind, having lost their breadwinner."
Bhosle is survived by his wife and a child.
'No water shortage'
However hospital officials vehemently denied any water shortage and, instead, blamed the police for the delay in conducting post-mortems.
"No, there is no shortage of water despite the water cut imposed in the city. Besides, the hospital has two or three different sources of water supply," said Sassoon Hospital dean Dr Arun Jamkar. "If there has indeed been any delay, it's possibly because the police haven't conducted the panchnama on time without which our doctors cannot go ahead with the post-mortem. Or there could be some other technical glitch at the hospital."
However, a forensic doctor from the hospital, who did not wish to be named, said that it was possible that the post-mortem had been delayed because of a water shortage.
"Sometimes, there are procedural delays or technical problems that we can't explain to relatives," the doctor said. "So, our staff members come up with such excuses. But it is possible that there might be water shortage at night."
The doctor said that in such a case, the autopsy would be delayed till the next morning as some stock of water has to be held back in reserved for the morning so that the normal routine at the hospital is not affected.
