According to the recent interviews conducted by Stanford Medicine School majority of Americans would prefer to die at home. Unfortunately, the real situation is different: from all died people the majority (60%) passed away in hospitals, 20% in the hospices, and only the remaining 20% are lucky to die at home.
Action List for Cases When Someone Died At Home Unexpectedly
If somebody lived alone and unexpectedly died it can be described with the term of an unattended death. The main danger consists of the fact that the body’s decomposition begins immediately after the death, so in case of finding someone dead in the house, certain precautions should be taken.
In case the body wasn’t found in several days it starts to decompose faster, especially in case of warm weather. This will result in fluid spillage from the body that can contain pathogens and dangerous diseases like HIV, Hepatitis, MRSA, and others. This is why even in case the died person was your close relative and you’re sure they did not suffer from diseases there’s still probability they could be carriers of infections. So the situation should be considered serious from the side of biohazard as well. In such a case follow the next recommendations:
- In a first turn call the police, who are aimed to take pics of the scene, check and collect evidence, and take the body from the house in a proper manner.
- Be careful with touching anything at home, don’t make attempts for cleaning, even if they’re a lot of dramatic physical reminders of happened there. Depending on each separate case the present biohazardous substances can significantly harm you bringing diseases and infections. Do not put yourself at risk when it is not necessary.
- Call professional service, like for example Signature Water and Fire Restoration. As the police are not responsible for cleaning the place of dramatic events and to perform cleaning by yourself can be too dangerous the specific professionals should be invited for these purposes. Being extremely polite and compassionate Signature Water and Fire Restoration will clean up the area and remove any reminders about the tragic events. The specific disinfection prepared at a hospital-level according to OSHA methods will leave no chances to be infected.
Action List If Death in a Hospice Happened
Death in the hospice should be treated in a conceptually another way than death at home and another procedure should be applied. The following actions should be taken for such a case:
- Death Pronouncement. The person who died should have the caregiver, who will be able to pronounce him dead with the date and the time of the death. If for some reason it is impossible to do, the deceased should be transported to the hospital, where it can be officially done. At the same time, calling 911 is able to call police, medicals or firefighters to the home, which are however have not righted for pronouncing the death. This function can be also given to coroner.
- For some cases, if applicable, the official document with the statement “Do not resuscitate” should be available to avoid reanimation actions performed at the last minute for prolonging the life of the person dying.
- Transportation of the deceased. Take care of arrangements regarding the transportation of the body ether to the morgue or to funeral home or crematorium. If the person who died was in elder years and was continuously observed by medicals there’s a high probability no autopsy is required, so the funeral home will be able to transport the body.
- Make respective notifications to:
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- Physician, who regularly observed the deceased, so the physician can make the note regarding the death in the personal profile and the profile can be closed;
- Family and close people, who should know someone they loved passed away;
- Pet care, if applicable, for temporary caring of the pet of the deceased and finding new owners;
- Employer, if the person who passed away was employed before he died. The employer should be also inquired regarding insurance policies, due wages or other possible benefits.
When the most recent actions described above have been already performed the following steps should be also done:
- Arrange funeral services;
- Death certificate obtaining; with making copies of it;
- Finding someone and arrange him for keeping the deceased’s residential property;
- Sending notifications to the social security, bank, insurance company for respective actions from their side;
- Notifying utilities service and post for stopping providing their services;
- Some other matters which may appear in further next months.
In case any help regarding cleaning services is needed to call Signature Water and Fire Restoration. Call us at 1-224-515-0100 so we will be able to send our technicians in several hours to help you handle your cleaning problems.