University Hospital Waterford to have new mortuary by 2021

A new mortuary at University Hospital Waterford will more than double the current building’s permanent storage capacity and include viewing rooms for relatives of the deceased when it opens in 2021.

Some €5.7 million in funding for a new building at the hospital, which provides mortuary and postmortem services for the southeast, was approved this week. The mortuary will be located in close to the current facility and there is to be improved ventilation in its storage facilities.

The announcement follows recent controversy about the conditions in the hospital’s existing mortuary.

A letter written by four consultant pathologists, obtained by The Waterford News and Star, criticised the poor the mortuary’s storage and refrigeration facilities. It stated that dead bodies had been left lying on trolleys at the hospital, leaking bodily fluids onto corridors and making closed-coffin funerals unavoidable at times.

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Other letters subsequently came to light including one from the pathologists which said that bodies had to be stored on the floor of the mortuary.

Another revealed that an executive in the South/South West Hospital Group told the HSE last summer that the mortuary was not “a suitable environment” for the dead.

The new building will have 14 spaces for body storage and four postmortem tables. The existing building had six spaces until last month when seven mobile refrigeration units were added.

Sinn Féin TD David Cullinane said the funding was welcome but it was “unfortunate that it took the recent scandal to move things forward - a scandal that caused extreme anxiety for the families concerned”.