MUSLIM FAMILY RAGE AT HOSPITAL DECISION TO SEIZE CORPSE. SEE WHAT THEY DID

The family members of Bashiru Makanjuola who passed away at the National Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi in Lagos have accused the hospital of seizing the corpse and not allowing them bury him which was against Islamic rite.
The Punch reports that the family of the 61 year old were unable to pay the bills totalling N471,810 and due to this, the hospital had been in custody of the corpse for over a month thereby preventing his family from burying him on the day he died.

The body of Bashiru-Makanjuola Image/The Punch

Azeez who is one of eight children of the deceased said his father was hit by a vehicle in Oshodi on September 1, 2015.
He said: “We got to Igbobi at about 11.30pm and he was admitted at the hospital’s casualty ward. He was seriously injured and the driver of the bus that hit him had fled.
“On September 5, he was moved to the Intensive Care Unit, where an operation was conducted on him to treat the internal wound he sustained. We were not told the charge. It was later the management said we were to pay N29, 000 per day.
“By then, he had spent 10 days and we quickly asked them to take him back to the ward, and he was taken to Ward J. But the hospital said we should first settle the ICU bill of N288, 000 before they can continue treatment. We begged them to continue, that we would pay, but they refused.”
He said that after Bashiru was left unattended for ten days, the family wrote a letter to the chief medical director and that they had paid N115,000 out of the N436,000 bill they were issued.
Part of the letter read: “We spoke with some doctors and asked what was going on. The reply we got was that the patient had been discharged and they could no longer give him any treatment, that we should go and settle our bills and take him away.
“We appealed to them to continue with the treatment, promising to settle the bills later. We later asked them to release the patient to us since we were financially handicapped. This man is a mere butcher; he has nothing to dispose of to settle his bills. The man’s flesh is peeling on the bed. He has a very big wound on his back and lap; and he has not been treated.
“But we were told that even if he died, we were still going to settle his bills before his remains would be released to us.”

When the medical director finally ordered that Bashiru be treated, the wound had become worse.
Azeez said: “We asked them to let us take him away from the hospital to somewhere else, but they insisted that we must settle the bills before they would discharge him. And because we did not have any money, we left him at the hospital, where he eventually died.”
Bashiru Adeniyi, a relative of the deceased accused the hospital of being responsible for Bashiru’s death.
“Their negligence killed the man. Now, they have seized the corpse and all our appeals have gone unheeded. He was supposed to be buried the same day, but they took him to the morgue because of the money. They are threatening us that they would cremate the corpse if we don’t clear the bills. They said apart from the 371,810 hospital bills, we will pay N100,000 for the mortuary bill, which is still accumulating.
“If they had released him to us earlier when we wrote the second letter, maybe he would not have died,” he said.