New measure: The Hospital Authority will introduce a Mortuary Information System using bar-coding to prevent the wrong identification of bodies.

The Hospital Authority will implement improvements to its mortuary services following a review on April's cremation mix-up in Prince of Wales Hospital.

At its administrative and operational meeting today, the authority concurred with the conclusion of the PWH investigation panel that the incident was mainly caused by non-compliance of a mortuary attendant with operation guidelines.

The panel also noted a number of other contributing factors, such as overcrowding of the mortuary leading to double occupancy of a compartment, and guidelines were not stringently enforced nor consistently complied with on all occasions.

Enhancement measures

Authority Director (Quality & Safety) Dr Leung Pak-yin said the enhancement programmes that will be introduced include:

* development of the Mortuary Information System to help minimise the risk of wrong identification through a bar-code system. The project will be developed in two phases in the second quarter of 2007 and the second quarter of 2008;

* enhancement of mortuary capacity across all clusters, which include an initial addition of 30 places in the new building of Pok Oi Hopsital, planning for about 220 additional mortuary places in 2007-08, and depending on funds, another 330 places to be added in 2008-09;

* streamlining the procedures on body collection and identification both on the nursing side during the collection of bodies from the ward and on the mortuary side with enhanced counterchecking and standardised documentation;

* staff training will be conducted to reinforce a system in which staff vigilance and compliance with proper procedures can be continuously sustained;

* to encourage early collection of bodies, communication with patients' relatives will be enhanced. In the case of overcrowding, it will be conveyed to families the need of sharing a compartment and possible transfer to other mortuaries.