THE health ministry yesterday ordered the use of death cards for medical records and mandatory identification bracelets for all in-patients as part of a new set of guidelines for the handling of bodies in public hospitals.

The new measures arise from an investigation into the circumstances surrounding which the newborn baby of Clarendon couple Pansy Campbell and Roy McLean was declared dead almost a year ago but was misplaced and has so far not been found.

The Ministry of Health, in a statement yesterday, said it had accepted the recommendations of a panel that was formed to probe the ‘Baby Pansy’ case. Among its recommendations was the use of an authorisation form by relatives to present to the hospital morgue or funeral home when they visit to identify or claim a body.

“The guidelines and recommendations for dealing with the death of in-patients, made by the panel that inquired into the disposal of the baby of Pansy Campbell has been accepted and will be incorporated in existing hospital manuals in all public hospitals islandwide,” said permanent secretary at the health ministry, Grace Allen-Young.

The permanent secretary said she had notified all regional directors to immediately implement the recommendations.

The panel’s report on the Baby Pansy probe highlighted breaches in the existing procedures in the death certification and mortuary operations. Among the breaches reported were a failure to keep accurate mortuary log books, tagging of bodies, and going through the proper channels for contacting relatives.

The health ministry came under fire last month after it was revealed that the Mandeville Regional Hospital was unable to account for the baby which was born in the May Pen Hospital in Clarendon on August 20, 2002, but was transferred to Mandeville due to complications.

On September 2, however, the mother was told that the baby had died, but the hospital was unable to produce the baby’s body. According to the parents, the body that they were eventually shown two months after was not their baby and their claim was further vindicated by a DNA test which proved that the hospital had given them the wrong body.

The ministry then appointed a team headed by former senior medical officer at the Bustamante Hospital, Dr Barbara Johnson, to investigate the circumstances surrounding the whereabouts of the baby’s body.

The parents of Baby Pansy, however, did not have an input in the recommendations of the Johnson Committee.

“Efforts to meet with the parents and their lawyer were unsuccessful and so the final report was presented without their input,” the health ministry said, while apologising for the emotional pain experienced by the parents.

At the same time, the ministry has recommended that the counselling services in place at hospitals be improved, and that there be ongoing customer training for all staff. These recommendations were apparently made because of the poor way in which the grieving parents were reportedly handled by hospital staff.

The Observer was yesterday unable to reach Campbell and McLean or their attorney, Dwight Reece, for comment on the health ministry’s report, and it was unclear yesterday whether any progress had been made in locating the missing baby’s body.

Other recommendations made by the four-member committee related to the procedure for transfers to morgues or funeral homes and the accurate keeping of mortuary log books which must be completed “even on days when no death has occurred”.

The other three persons on the committee were Dr Denise Duncan-Goffe, director of health services planning and integration at the Ministry of Health; Gloria Gibbs, acting director of the Investigation and Enforcement Department, Ministry of Health; and Jean Andrade, former director of patient affairs at the University Hospital of the West Indies.