The regional administration of northwest Russia's Murmansk region is looking into complaints by a hospital patient who said he was forced to share a room with a dead body after the hospital's morgue ran out of space, the regional FlashNord news agency reported Sunday.
The family of the patient said he had to share the room with the corpse for two days, while a hospital spokesperson maintained it “wasn't a question of days, but of three hours at the most,” the report said.
The patient at the Sevryba hospital, run by the Murmansk regional Health Ministry, had left his room “for a couple of hours” and returned to find his roommate dead, a family member was quoted as saying.
“To the request to remove the corpse, nurses responded that he would have to coexist with [the dead roommate] for at least a day, because the morgue had run out of space,” the relative was quoted as saying.
A hospital spokesperson confirmed the incident, but said the dead body was taken out of the room within three hours, FlashNord reported.
The Murmansk regional administration was looking into the incident, the governor's office spokesman Dmitry Ischenko was quoted as saying.
