Body business up close and personal

By LIBBY MIDDLEBROOK

Kevin Lovell's hand is wiggling in the direction of the viewing window.

"You see? You see?" he says, eager to point out the best features of the new Auckland mortuary.

"Now medical students can get up close and personal during an autopsy without being in the same room as the body," boasts Mr Lovell, a project manager for Carson Group, which oversaw the morgue development.

While Mr Lovell's audience struggles to share his enthusiasm during a tour of the new Grafton morgue, viewing rooms are a major plus for those in the body business.

For the past 20 years, medical students have been hovering around autopsy tables in the basement of Auckland Hospital.

From this month they will be protected by a glass screen, with lessons taking place via intercom in the new state-of-the-art morgue, operated by Auckland Healthcare.

It is the first facility to open in a $500 million upgrade of Auckland's hospital services.

Sharing a building with laboratory and pathology services, the mortuary has abandoned its basement home in favour of a swanky ground-level address: LabPlus.

The 810 sq m morgue, the largest in the country, comes complete with a water feature, landscaped garden and light fittings that would make any home decorator green with envy.

The storage section of the morgue resembles a commercial kitchen, with its stainless-steel bench tops and huge fridges, though visitors are not likely to find cheese and crackers inside the chilly receptacles.

The morgue can store around 40 bodies in its fridges, at a temperature of 4 deg. A freezer caters for up to six others at minus 20 deg.

But the most celebrated feature of the mortuary is its High Risk Post Mortem Suite, allowing technicians and pathologists to manage bodies carrying highly infectious diseases.

This year, the mortuary was criticised for refusing to carry out an autopsy on Valerie-Anne Loveday, aged 53, who died from suspected Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human equivalent of mad cow disease. Her body was transferred to Christchurch, which had the only mortuary in the country that met safety standards for such cases.

Now bodies carrying suspected diseases such as CJD, TB and HIV will be refrigerated and studied in a self-contained post-mortem suite, featuring a high-tech ventilation system.

"It's definitely a real plus having the infectious suite," said the technical head of the mortuary, John Russell. "The staff are really keen on the move now that we can cater for infectious cases ... It's a new challenge."

The Auckland mortuary's 14 staff handle around 1400 autopsies a year to determine the cause of death for anything from homicides to suicides. Last year, they performed 14 autopsies on cases posing a high risk of infection.

The "everyday" post-mortem room accommodates a tissue transplant laboratory and eight work stations, including body trays and scissor and knife sets. Any spills are collected by the tiny drains that mark the grey floor.

Staff wear protective white gumboots, trousers, aprons and head-gear and pass through a washing bay before leaving the facility.

"I enjoy the work," said Rodney Smith, a forensic technician, who likes to listen to radio music while carrying out autopsies.

"People generally develop a macabre sense of humour here that you probably wouldn't carry outside work."

The entire facility is protected by a mass of security intercom systems, cameras and door codes, with some bodies transferred to the morgue via an underground tunnel from the hospital.

Family and visitor facilities have also been improved to include a whanau room, two police identification rooms and a waiting room cafe.