All the Tamale Teaching Hospital mortuary fridges are back working after being offline for almost a month.
The breakdown of the mortuary fridges was as a result of a power surge in the area.
“Electrical power surges experienced on 27th June 2019, at the Tamale Teaching Hospital, resulted in damage to the electrical boards of the outdoor units of all five mortuary fridges at the Department of Pathology. An enquiry at the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo) control room confirmed [that] the power surges were as a result of challenges with some transmission lines.”
On July 6, the hospital embarked on a mass burial exercise due to the breakdown of four out of the five mortuary fridges.
The hospital secured a “court order for the mass burial of unclaimed bodies that had accumulated at the morgue over a period of time.”
There are reports that a total of 24 corpses were buried during the exercise.
After the power surge on June 27, the Biomedical Engineering Unit of the hospital was able to get one of the fridges functional, by replacing one of the faulty outdoor units with an older one.
