How mortuary men are recruited in Ghana

Following the Tema Community 9 cemetery incident where a mortuary man was reported to have stormed the area and seized a corpse over the non-payment of GH¢40 debt owed for services he rendered, mynewsgh.com exclusively had an interview with the mortuary manager at the Korle Bu Teaching hospital in Accra on how they [Mortuary Men ] are recruited.

Mr George Denkyira revealed that before one is accepted for the job, he must first apply and when accepted is engaged as an orderly doing menial jobs including cleaning.

“As a hospital orderly, you become an apprentice mortuary attendant and taught how to move a body, put a body in a fridge and prepare a body for the pathologist. He is also expected to do cleaning and other jobs”, he revealed.

According to him, such orderlies are further trained on how to help open up corpse for the pathologists at the various health facilities and when they exhibit high expertise in these areas are promoted to the role of mortuary men.

On processes leading to a dead body being deposited at the morgue he said “the person must first of all be certified dead by a medical doctor. When the corpse arrives here, there are clerks who take details of the body and tag it with an ID bracelet for easy identification. This is also to avert the situation where relations of deceased persons pick the wrong corpse. We have a database and can tell where each corpse is placed in the fridge”

He revealed that the corpse is usually taken through what is described as last offers where openings of the dead body are sealed by nurses before it is put in the fridge for preservation.

On why he chose to work at the mortuary, he indicated that his curiosity led to his current profession advising the populace to hasten slowly to caution because where the mentally deranged person will be buried, it is the same place the rich and proud in society will also rest.

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