The Polish Funeral Industry Chamber is calling for an immediate end to the blatant underpricing of services provided to hospitals and care facilities for the collection and storage of bodies, and for the actual shifting of these costs onto the families of the deceased. The Polish Federation of Entrepreneurs addresses this issue in a special letter to the Ministry of Health and the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection. The Polish Funeral Industry Chamber, a member of the federation, has been monitoring these negative practices for some time and has been raising the alarm about the increasing number of irregularities in this area.
Practices, which involve the collection and storage of deceased bodies and ignore the standards in the funeral sector, according to the Polish Funeral Industry Chamber, may occur in around 200 Polish health care facilities, primarily in hospitals and care centers.
Robert Czyżak, president of the Polish Funeral Industry Chamber, highlights the increasingly large scale of this negative trend, which involves hospitals and other similar institutions not having their own coolers and renting them, along with the collection of bodies from hospital wards, from funeral companies.
According to him, the root of the problem lies in the drastic underpricing of collection and storage rates for bodies and associated activities. The entities operating in this way “bounce back” these very low costs, which they win in many instances in tenders organized by health protection facilities, by receiving the proper fee for these services from the families of the deceased.
The deceased’s families, who are under the care of such companies, will pay essentially any amount for a burial, which includes storage for the deceased, their transportation or preparation for the burial itself. Families often cannot rationally assess the situation in such difficult moments and question whether they have the right and can use the services of another company or whether one may treat the family of a deceased person in this way.
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Robert Czyżak notes an obvious analogy to what took place at the beginning of the 2000s in Łódź. He finds it alarming that a very similar procedure of trading information about deaths was operational back then.
How to solve this problem? Amend the Funeral Law
There is still hope to solve this problem, everything ultimately depends on the government.
The amendment to the Funeral Law expected for several years now would significantly restrict activities such as these. It would require hospitals and other similar institutions to possess their own facilities for storing bodies, for instance, coolers.
Czyżak once again appeals to the authorities to begin work that will result in the introduction of new regulations. The project has long been ready and contains regulations that meet the current challenges in this area. The existing laws were mostly created almost 100 years ago.
According to Czyżak and all entities are associated with his chamber, the project to amend the Funeral Law should finally be taken out of the so-called “freezer,” as there are no clear signals from the government about their readiness to resume work on this.
The president of the Polish Funeral Industry Chamber confirms that the genuinely operating funeral companies are facing various problems, sometimes finding themselves in circumstances worthy of being dramatized in the form of a thriller.
Czyżak emphasizes that, unfortunately, leasing of mortuary rooms in hospitals to funeral companies, which despite being prohibited from advertising in such places, benefit from the privilege of being the first contact for families of deceased persons, is still practiced.
Source: https://managerplus.pl/federacja-przedsiebiorcow-polskich-o-patologiach-na-rynku-funeralnym-39008
