Funeral parlour's licence suspended, licensee to be charged after wrong body cremated

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Quote

SINGAPORE: A funeral parlour's licence has been suspended and its licensee set to be charged after a mix-up resulted in a wrong body being cremated.

In response to CNA queries, the National Environment Agency (NEA) said on Saturday (Jan 4) that it has issued a notice to suspend the licence of Century Products funeral parlour after investigations showed that proper records were not kept of bodies received or removed from its premises.

An inspection of Century Products' premises by NEA on Dec 31, 2019 also confirmed the breaches, the agency said.

The licensee will be charged under the Environmental Public Health (Funeral Parlours) Regulations for the infringements.

"The National Environment Agency takes a serious view of licensees who fail to ensure that their funeral parlours with embalming facilities keep proper records and uphold environmental hygiene standards," said an NEA spokesperson.

NEA also investigated the actions of the implicated funeral director Harmony Funeral Care.

Insufficient measures were put in place by the funeral director to ensure the proper handling of the body, resulting in the "egregious error", NEA added.

"NEA will bar Harmony Funeral Care from the use of government after-death facilities at Mandai Crematorium and Choa Chu Kang Crematorium and Cemetery until it can demonstrate to NEA that it has implemented satisfactory measures to prevent such future errors," the spokesperson said.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/cremation-funeral-suspended-charged-century-products-harmony-12233302

[Jamesc]

KIV for MIL.

[Tohto]

18 minutes ago, Jamesc said:

KIV for MIL.

No chance, licence already suspend. 

[ER-3682]

Rad-X should know them.

[Kusje]

9 hours ago, Jamesc said:

KIV for MIL.

I'd recommend against it. If they don't keep proper records and cremate the wrong body, can you be sure your MIL won't rise again as a zombie?

You will be sleepless for the rest of your life.

[Kusje]

We should be jailing, fining and also caning these crooked biz owners. Don't let them get off with just a slap on the wrist for scamming us.

Look at what happened the the banks when they were caught manipulating SIBOR. Nothing much and there was no compensation to home owners who take loans with sibor linked instruments. 

[Unltd]

10 minutes ago, Kusje said:

We should be jailing, fining and also caning these crooked biz owners. Don't let them get off with just a slap on the wrist for scamming us.

Look at what happened the the banks when they were caught manipulating SIBOR. Nothing much and there was no compensation to home owners who take loans with sibor linked instruments. 

Crooked biz owners imply those out to cheat, something like purposely swapping out the body with another.

in this case it seems like it is accidental and due to lack of procedures, no doubt it causes great distress and a punishment needs to be meted out, in this case a major suspension.

but this is not a case ic cheating or maliciously trying to cause the distress.

[Kusje]

4 minutes ago, Unltd said:

Crooked biz owners imply those out to cheat, something like purposely swapping out the body with another.

in this case it seems like it is accidental and due to lack of procedures, no doubt it causes great distress and a punishment needs to be meted out, in this case a major suspension.

but this is not a case ic cheating or maliciously trying to cause the distress.

If you skip having proper procedures and checks so you can make more money then shit happens, I don't think you should be absolved just because you weren't out to cheat.

[Unltd]

4 minutes ago, Kusje said:

If you skip having proper procedures and checks so you can make more money then shit happens, I don't think you should be absolved just because you weren't out to cheat.

Errr... I didn’t say they should be absolved... in fact in the 2nd para of my reply I did state a punishment needs to be meted out.

but to say crooked business owner seems to imply they were malicious or out to cheat, that’s quite different.

[Jamesc]

49 minutes ago, Kusje said:

I'd recommend against it. If they don't keep proper records and cremate the wrong body, can you be sure your MIL won't rise again as a zombie?

You will be sleepless for the rest of your life.

You are absolutely right!.

Better make sure to go to a good one

so dead and gone forever is

dead and gone forever.

Pay more also never mind.

A lot more also ok.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Jamesc

[RogerNg_185295]

1 hour ago, Kusje said:

If you skip having proper procedures and checks so you can make more money then shit happens, I don't think you should be absolved just because you weren't out to cheat.

Defamation, libel suits.  Watch your words. 

[Jamesc]

Mistake are always made all the time.

I make them all the time too.

As if people here never make any mistakes.

Everyone in Singapore is trained to deny making any mistakes.

But remove the blinkers and if we are honest with ourselves we can see we make mistakes all the time in our jobs.

But we are condition not to admit but worse still we not only deny to everyone else we deny to our selves.

To see how many mistakes we make, we don't admit here the mistakes we make, let us just say about mistakes other people make - the more stupid the better.

I will start - doctor operating on the wrong patient. Who here has never heard this?

Wrong sperm used and gave birth to wrong baby. Ang moh father with chinese mother and suddenly very dark skin baby come out.

Performing surgery on the wrong area of the body.

Pilot flying to the wrong place.

Doctor leaving their instrument inside the body and sewing it up.

Me - I went into the wrong room and massage the wrong lady.

Wrong medicine given or wrong dosage given - way too much or too little.

Received the wrong heart and lungs, then died

A $200,000 mistake - surgeons mistakenly removed the healthy right testicle of 47-year-old Air Force veteran Benjamin Houghton.

The patient had been complaining of pain and shrinkage of his left testicle so doctors decided to schedule surgery to remove it due to cancer fears.

However, the veteran’s medical records suggest a series of missteps — from an error on the consent form to a failure on the part of medical personnel to mark the proper surgical site before the procedure.

The error, which took place at the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center, spurred a $200,000 lawsuit from Houghton and his wife.

Donald Church, 49, had a tumor in his abdomen when he arrived at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle in June 2000.

When he left, the tumor was gone — but a metal retractor had taken its place. Doctors admitted to leaving the 13-inch-long retractor in Church’s abdomen by mistake. 

An open heart invasive procedure… on the wrong patient

Hospital makes a wrong-sided brain surgery… for the third time in a year.

For the third time on the same year, doctors at Rhode Island Hospital have operated on the wrong side of a patient’s head.

The Surgeon who removed the wrong leg - In what was, perhaps, the most publicized case of a surgical mistake in its time, a Tampa (Florida) surgeon mistakenly removed the wrong leg of his patient, 52-year-old Willie King, during an amputation procedure in February 1995.

The healthy kidney removed by mistake

In St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a patient was submitted at Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital to have one of his kidneys removed because it had a tumor believed to be cancerous. Instead, doctors removed the healthy one.

Wide-Awake Surgery led to his suicide

A West Virginia man’s family claims inadequate anesthetic during surgery allowed him to feel every slice of the surgeon’s scalpel – a trauma they believe led him to take his own life two weeks later. 

Sherman Sizemore was admitted to Raleigh General Hospital in Beckley, W.Va., Jan. 19, 2006 for exploratory surgery to determine the cause of his abdominal pain.

Not so funny: wrong artery bypassed

Two months after a double bypass heart operation that was supposed to save his life, comedian and former Saturday Night Live cast member Dana Carvey got some disheartening news: the cardiac surgeon had bypassed the wrong artery. 

Surgeon Told The Wrong Families About Their Babies

My brother realized about 15 minutes later that he had mixed up the families. He told the family with the healthy baby that their baby wasn't going to make it, and he told the family with the dying baby that their baby was going to be just fine. He then had to go back out to the families and explain the situation to them.

Nurse's Medication Error Almost Ended A Postpartum Patient 

When I was a student rotating through OB-GYN, I wrote an order for a woman's postpartum continuation of magnesium sulfate... I was super careful, because I knew what could happen with magnesium toxicity, and double-checked the order with the resident afterwards.

The nurse, instead of hanging one bag of mag-sulfate and another of I forget what, hung two bags of mag-sulfate, one of which she slammed into the patient over a minute, instead of slow-infusing over 12 hours.

The woman told the nurse she didn't feel right, and the nurse pooh-poohed it. I happened to be walking by, and stopped in to see what was up. There they were, two bags hanging, both marked in a bright red warning label. We called for the fast-response team.

Pharmacists Gave A Patient Too Much Prozac

Worked with a pharmacist back in the mid 2000s when I was still a tech who filled a script for Prozac solution. (Concentrated, it is 20 mg per mL. Average adult dose is 20 mg.) Instead of 1 mL once daily, he filled it for one teaspoonful (5 mL).

The child got serotonin syndrome and almost [passed]. [The pharmacist] is no longer working to my knowledge.

Doctor Collapsed The Wrong Lung 

My parents are nurses. They knew a doc who'd been on a 36-hour shift. Patient came in with a punctured lung (I think) and the doc had to collapse the lung to fix whatever was wrong with it.

Through tiredness, he collapsed the wrong lung, and the patient [perished]. Doc ended up [taking his own life] after being fired.

Surgical Resident Damaged The Nerves Of An Aspiring Violinist

I'm a surgical resident and my focus is on pediatrics. I have done a fair amount of surgeries so far and death is not an uncommon thing for me. But the worst was a case with a then 8-year-old kid. I was operating on his ulnar and accidentally caused damage on the nearby nerve.

He lost about 20% of his sensory stimulus. He wanted to be a violinist.

Four Children Passed After A 'Completely Wrong Diagnosis'

I had a 9-year-old girl bought in one night with her parents complaining of fever and respiratory distress, presenting with coughing and wheezing. The kid was really out of it and the parents were very upset. I thought it was bronchitis, but I admitted her and ordered treatment for her fever and cough, as well as throat cultures.

I was with another patient when the kid started hallucinating, sobbing, and spewing everywhere. I figured it had to do with the fever, so I packed her with ice, but she [passed] maybe a half-hour after that. This wasn't my first [experience with this], but it was one of the worst. I couldn't tell the stiff neck since the kid was out of it. She also couldn't tell me anything else that would point to simple or complex seizures.

She [passed from] neisseria meningitidis. Completely wrong diagnosis. To make matters worse, we called in all her schoolmates and anyone else we could wake up just in time to see three other kids go. The rest got antibiotics quickly enough.

Not a big mistake, but definitely awkward at the time. I was gluing up a [laceration] on a 14-year-old girl's forehead. Anyone who has used Dermabond before knows that stuff can be runny and bonds very quickly. I glued my glove to her face. Her mum was in the room, and I had to turn to her and say, "I'm sorry, I've just glued my glove to her face."

Nurse Told A Doctor To Recheck Anatomy During A Vasectomy 

Nurse here. I was assisting during a vasectomy. The doctor found the testicular artery and thought it was the vas deferens (the sperm tract) and was about to tie it off and cut it.

No kidding er I mean no kids!

In a very diplomatic way, I told him to double-check the anatomy.

Dentist Pulled Out The Wrong Tooth

Dentist here. I was performing a simple extraction and preparing for the case when I didn't realize that I had the X-ray flipped the wrong way the whole time. I was viewing the film backwards, and pulled out the wrong tooth. When I realized my mistake I started freaking out, only to find out that by some dumb luck, the tooth I extracted had to go as well.

I'm a lab tech and used to work in histology when I was new. I got a skin biopsy specimen and that day I was embedding - basically putting the fixed tissue into wax so it could be mounted on a cutting block to slice 3 micrometer sections for staining. It's very important what side you place "down," based on how it was cut out of the body.

Well, I messed up and placed it sideways instead of down. The person cutting the tissue couldn't tell and ended up cutting through the tissue. This was a problem because the patient had skin cancer and they were looking at how far it had spread. Since it was cut too deep, they couldn't see the edges anymore.

This means the doctor had to cut a bigger piece of skin off to be sure they got it all. That's when I found out it was a skin biopsy from the patient's nose. This patient had to have a bigger, potentially unnecessary, piece of skin from his face cut off because of me.

When I was a medical student, I was on a vascular surgery rotation, and a patient came in with aortitis, a rare and extremely severe infection of the aorta. However, he was doing pretty well and we were treating the infection conservatively with antibiotics, and hoping we wouldn't have to operate.

My job in the team was to go to the patients and take their vitals a couple of times a day, and examine them to see how they were going. When I want to examine this guy, he was lying flat on his back, so I said I would sit him up in bed to take his blood pressure. I raised the head of the bed, and a few seconds later he started to complain of severe pain and passed out straight after that.

He was taken straight to theatre [an operating room] and opened up, and it became apparent that his aorta had ruptured due to the increase in abdominal pressure when I sat him up.

He was bleeding out all over the table, and when the senior surgeon tried to clamp his aorta to control the bleeding, the tissue was so friable that the clamp cut straight through it. There was essentially nothing we could do as this guy bled out his entire blood volume within about a minute.

My brother had a [feeding tube] put in his stomach... due to aspiration risks secondary to cerebral palsy. During the surgery, the surgeon accidentally perforated his bowel and it went unnoticed. This is probably due to my brother's unusual anatomy, as he has severe scoliosis and kyphosis.

My mom started to notice my brother appeared to be in pain. He, however, had no way of telling her what was wrong (nonverbal and no control of muscle movements). She then noticed the smell of feces coming out of his incision site. His medical team assured her he was all right and she was overreacting.

It was soon discovered that he was going septic as his digested food was going back into his stomach and poisoning him. By this time he was in life-threatening condition and had to be air-lifted to a city located] a four-hour drive away.

The perforated bowel was repaired and my brother made a full recovery. His surgeon now does that procedure differently to prevent the same complication, and I've been told it's effective. I believe he does an endoscopy before closing up and that adds five to 10 minutes to the surgery.

My parents had no interest in suing and are glad my brother is healthy and [that] his situation helped advance medicine/possibly save others.

Patient Received The Wrong HIV Test Results

I do HIV testing and once I showed up to work super tired because I couldn't sleep the night before. This guy comes in for a test, we go through the pre-counseling, and then I tell him to step out for a few minutes while the results come up.

Once he came back to get his results, I told him to take a [seat], and the first thing that came out of my mouth was, "Your results are positive," and then I saw the look on his face.

That's when I realized I f*cked up. I then said, "Oh no, no, no, I meant to say negative." I almost gave the guy a heart attack.

Nurse Gave A Patient Urine To Take With Pills

RN here: I was taking care of a man with liver failure who was not a candidate for a transplant. He "waxed and waned," meaning he vacillated between complete brain function and confusion. I brought him his pills and made some small talk. We chatted a little bit before I handed him a cup to drink from on his bedside table.

He tossed the pills in his mouth and took a gulp from the cup. He looked at me and said, "That's piss," in a really matter-of-fact way. I checked the cup. It was. While he was confused, he must have gone in the cup instead of his urinal and then forgotten about it. Now I always check before handing people cups from their bedside tables.

Nurse Mistakenly Gave Two Patients Lethal Injections

At the hospital I work at, during a very stressful shift, a nurse accidentally mixed two infusions for two separate patients with 100 mL of potassium chloride, instead of sodium chloride (NaCl).

They both [passed] within minutes of one another.

Surgeon's Disastrous Cut In A Patient's Bowel

Apparently the surgeon had nicked the man's bowels. As a result, his abdomen filled with waste and essentially poisoned him. She was absolutely devastated.

She later found out that the same surgeon had made other mistakes in the past. Needless to say, she left that hospital as soon as possible and got a much lower-paying job in a doctor's office.

[Jamesc]

Any time my MIL complain of the slightest thing wrong with her body

I will always immediately take her to see the doctor.

My wife now thinks I am so concern for her mother's heath she is so happy and sayang me so much more now.

She don't know I have been reading up on doctors very common mistakes and its only a matter of time before you can read about my MIL as an example.

[Jamesc]

Its not only mistakes that doctors do

They always write the wrong things on the patients medical charts.

Some are so funny

The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.

The baby was delivered, the cord clamped and cut, and handed to the pediatrician, who breathed and cried immediately.

Exam of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized - How BIG is that? 

She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life until 1989 when she got a divorce. Must be due to the husband. Maybe has asked for rear entry?

The patient was in his usual state of good health until his airplane ran out of gas and crashed.

Rectal exam revealed a normal size thyroid. (Long fingers?)

Between you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant. (Hehe)

A midsystolic ejaculation murmur heard over the mitral area.

The patient lives at home with his mother, father, and pet turtle, who is presently enrolled in day care three times a week.

Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.

She is numb from her toes down.

Exam of genitalia was completely negative except for the right foot.

The patient was to have a bowel resection. However, he took a job as stockbroker instead.

When she fainted, her eyes rolled around the room.

Examination reveals a well-developed male lying in bed with his family in no distress.

She has no rigors or chills but her husband says she was very hot in bed last night. (Must have been a good night)

She can't get pregnant with her husband, so I will work her up.(Lucky doctor)

Whilst in Casualty she was examined, X-rated and sent home.

The patient states there is a burning pain in his penis which goes to his feet.

On the second day the knee was better and on the third day it had completely disappeared. (No knee to worry)

The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 1983. (Faster change your doctor)

I will be happy to go into her GI system, she seems ready and anxious.

Patient was released to outpatient department without dressing. (Naked?)

I have suggested that he loosen his pants before standing, and then, when he stands with the help of his wife, they should fall to the floor.

The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.

Discharge status: Alive but without permission.

The patient will need disposition, and therefore we will get Dr. Blank to dispose of him.

Healthy-appearing, decrepit 69 year old male, mentally alert but forgetful.

The patient has no past history of suicides.

The patient expired on the floor uneventfully.

Patient has left his white blood cells at another hospital.

Patient was becoming more demented with urinary frequency.

The patient's past medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days.

She slipped on the ice and apparently her legs went in separate directions in early December.

The patient experienced sudden onset of severe shortness of breath with a picture of acute pulmonary oedema at home while having sex which gradually deteriorated in the emergency room.

Patient has chest pains if she lies on her left side for over a year.

He had a left-toe amputation one month ago. He also had a left-knee amputation last year. (Hmm the doctor is lying)

By the time he was admitted, his rapid heart had stopped, and he was feeling much better.

The patient is a 79-year-old widow who no longer lives with her husband.

The patient refused an autopsy. ( I would too. Because they have to kill you to do an autopsy)

Many years ago the patient had frostbite of the right shoe.

The bugs that grew out of her urine were cultured in the Casualty and are not available. I WILL FIND THEM!!!

The patient left the hospital feeling much better except for her original complaints.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Jamesc

[Jamesc]

Keeping things in perspective the bodies are already dead.

How big can the mistakes be?

If people know they should be more worries why flying on planes.

This is what the pilots are saying with ATC that you cannot hear.

If you hear maybe you scared to fly and this is why I keep sending my MIL for holidays.

😀

 

[Jamesc]

You guys obviously never think about safety do you. Pilot said to ATC.

ATC: 3 miles, no 5 miles, no 6 miles, correction 6 miles to inbound

Pilot to ATC: 3 times I told you that, 3 times I am declaring an emergency. 

ATC: I want to verify you are declaring an emergency.

Pilot: Clear everybody OUT OF OUR WAY.

😀

 

Edited January 5, 2020 by Jamesc

[ER-3682]

If NEA banned Harmony Funeral Care using Mandai Crematorium...this means out of the Business for them,99% of Christain Cremated at Mandai crematorium,without it,not possible for Christain to cremate at Kong Meng Suan or Tse Tho Aum Temples......

[Jamesc]

Dead is dead and gone is gone.

When I am ALIVE treat me NICE

When I am gone you can feed my body to the dogs for all I care.

We never treat people nice when they are living but so concern for the dead bodies.

Anyway more things you never expect to hear when you are flying.

😀