Grieving families were given wrong bodies

A coroner admitted today that a hospital blunder that led to two dead bodies being mixed-up and given to the wrong grieving families could have happened before.

Manchester coroner Leonard Gorodkin was speaking after Manchester Royal Infirmary admitted it had confused the bodies of two men both named John Walsh who died at the hospital last year.

The error was only discovered after the cremation of one of the men.

The hospital mortuary is classed as a public area and therefore under the jurisdiction of Mr Gorodkin.

He said the circumstances of the error had been "exceptional" but could not rule out the possibility it had happened before.

He said: "I have never heard of anything like this happening before in all of my 30 years work in the region and we have never had any previous complaints.

"But it could well be that any mistakes that have occurred have been buried or cremated."

He refused to speculate as to whether this case could lead to a flood of historical complaints.

He denied that he was overseeing any investigation into the circumstances that led to the mistake.

He said that the hospital had since assured him that the method for identifying bodies had been changed in order to prevent the mistake happening again.

The hospital carried out an internal investigation after it became apparent that the body of John Nicholas Melling Walsh, aged 77, who died on July 8 last year, was given to the family of a second man named John Walsh, which was later cremated.

The family of John NM Walsh raised concerns that the body did not look like their loved one when they viewed him before he was due to be buried. A hospital inquiry later revealed the mistake.