How fear of the dead is costing Moroto hospital

The management of Moroto Regional Referral Hospital on Monday held a stakeholders’ meeting in Moroto Municipality to address the challenge of unclaimed dead bodies that keep increasing at the facility.
It is a cultural practice among Karimojong for those who witness the death of a loved one to abandon the body and flee with their belongings and cattle.
As a result, many dead bodies are often abandoned at Moroto hospital, creating a dilemma for the management of the facility.
The Moroto Regional Referral Hospital director, Dr Stephen Pande, told Daily Monitor in an interview yesterday that the hospital mortuary has a capacity to only carry one body but they are usually stuck with more than five unclaimed bodies at a time.
“We have had to secure a service provider to keep burying the bodies that go unclaimed. At first, the service provider quoted a budget of shs300,000 per body, but due to inflation, he revised it to Shs450,000 per body,” he said.
Numbers
Dr Pande said between July 2022 and May this year, they have buried at least 44 bodies that were abandoned at the facility, something that has left them financially constrained.
“In today’s meeting with stakeholders, we agreed that let the mortuary only handle cases that die within the hospital, those that die elsewhere shouldn’t be brought here,” he said.
“For whatever reasons that we don’t know, people here still fear the dead, they have always abandoned them to the hospital,” Dr Pande added.
He said in the meeting, it was resolved that they lobby the Ministry of Health to build a modern mortuary at the hospital as a long-term solution.
Ministry urged
Mr Richard Eyaru, the town clerk for Moroto Municipality, said they agreed to travel to Kampala and directly present their request to ministry officials.
He said to make matters worse, Moroto hospital receives all kinds of patients as result of the lack of divisional health facilities.
Mr Eyaru added that they need a burial ground for the municipality and their own mortuary, which, he said, can only happen when the funds are available.
Mr Ismael Mohammed, the mayor for Moroto Municipality, said to tackle the burden, the culture of disposing of the dead in the sub-region should be discouraged.