Sally Furniss
Well-known member
Undertakers prepare for flu pandemic
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4032934a20475.html
By JOHN HARTEVELT - The Press | Saturday, 21 April 2007
Funeral directors are preparing for a rush on business, but are casting their minds to pandemics, not profits.
Funeral directors will be involved in an unusual exercise next month – Operation Cruickshank, a pandemic response trial. They will be quizzed about their capacity to deal with a rush of corpses.
Canterbury District Health Board pandemic planner David Roseveare said funeral directors were "great at handling the current workload" but would have to be ready to deal with extraordinary demands in the case of a pandemic.
"People are still going to die of the usual things in the middle of a pandemic, but (there will be) a significantly higher number of additional bodies to be disposed of. The question then is how do they change their system to steer us through this substantially larger number," he said.
Roseveare said funeral services might have to deal with "anything up to another 60 to 100 bodies per day".
Emergency management planner Jon Mitchell said funeral services would work with local government to manage the disposal of bodies "as effectively and efficiently as possible".
Roseveare said funeral directors would have to be flexible about body disposal.
"It's not just the picking up, there's also the question of burial. How is that going to be arranged when you're looking at potentially much larger numbers? There's a mindset shift that's required to deal with what's possible," he said.
"It may not be ethical, it may not be nice, it may not even be legal, but it might be the only thing you can do."
The chairman of the pandemic planning committee for funeral directors, Simon Manning, said burial would be the preferred option in the case of a pandemic.
"We believe that we'll be able to deal with this pandemic quite comfortably, apart from the worst three weeks when we would be giving up on burying people in their own (chosen) plots," he said.
Some bodies would not be able to be buried where families requested. Instead, they would have to go into a Government arranged plot. People who wished to be cremated may have to be buried, due to an expected shortage of medical professionals – two of whom are required to carry out a cremation.
Manning said there was no chance authorities would have to resort to mass graves.
Mitchell said legislative changes last year had enabled agencies "to streamline the process" of body disposal in a declared pandemic.
"They did that so that there could be more practical arrangements that would be able to work given the expected increase in demand for those sorts of services," he said.
Operation Cruickshank starts on May 10 and runs to May 23.