COVID patients with same name leads to confusion in death certificates

PTI, Dec 9, 2020, 8:46 AM IST

New Delhi: A mistake on the part of the medical staff at a leading COVID-19 dedicated hospital here led to a living patient at the facility being wrongly “declared dead,” his family member said on Tuesday.

A senior official at the city government-run LNJP Hospital, however, said the confusion happened due to the patient, Shrinwas Kumar, being a namesake of another patient, who later died.

“Both Shrinwases, aged 33 and 44, were brought to the hospital within a few minutes of a gap, and the 44-year-old COVID patient later died. Some mistake happened by nursing orderlies in shifting of the two patients,” the official said.

That happened by mistake and because the “phone numbers had also got exchanged, leading to a confusion”, she said.

A family member of 33-year-old Shrinwas, said, “He is living and at the hospital, but his death certificate got made which mentions the date of death as December 1. How strange is that”.

The LNJP Hospital official said “the matter has now been sorted”.

The papers were “exchanged” but there was “no deficiency in care,” she claimed.

In June, the authorities at LNJP Hospital, the largest Delhi government facility had admitted that there was “an instance of misidentification involving dead bodies of two persons having the same name, i.e. Moinuddin”.

The facility had also claimed that there was “no negligence” on the part of the authorities of the hospital.

LNJP Hospital is a dedicated COVID-19 facility of the Delhi government.

Both patients, named Moinuddin had tested positive for coronavirus infection. Both had died at the hospital on June 4.