Barbados authorities have introduced emergency measures aimed at clearing a backlog that has delayed the release of burial and cremation warrants and caused additional distress for grieving families.<\/p>\n
Minister of Legal Affairs and Criminal Justice Michael Lashley and Attorney General Wilfred Abrahams met with Barbados Association of Funeral Directors President Ian Griffith after funeral homes raised concerns about delays at the Coroner’s Office and problems obtaining essential documentation.<\/p>\n
The intervention followed reports of persistent delays as well as a computer system outage at the Coroner’s Office. Funeral directors had been instructed to hand-deliver medical certificates of death, warrants to bury and identification documents while the technical problem was being addressed. Griffith argued that the computer outage was only one part of wider problems affecting the process.<\/p>\n
Following Monday’s meeting, Lashley said short-term measures were being implemented while a working group would examine longer-term solutions. Government planned to establish a dedicated processing desk and move the relevant processing function to the Registry while networking problems at the Forde and Simmons Complex were addressed.<\/p>\n
Manual processing had also been used with the acting coroner to work through outstanding documents. Funeral industry officials said some families had faced delays lasting several weeks, while at least one or two funeral services had been postponed.<\/p>\n
The problems had already drawn the attention of the Attorney General, who described the concerns raised by the funeral directors as serious enough to require immediate investigation. Abrahams said the matter fell under Lashley’s portfolio but was being approached as a wider government issue.<\/p>\n
Griffith has also called for broader reform of the system used to manage human remains, from the point of death through post-mortem examinations, release to funeral homes and the issuing of official documentation.<\/p>\n
The newly established working group is expected to examine permanent operating procedures and possible legislative changes intended to prevent a repeat of the delays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Government and funeral directors met to address delays affecting burial and cremation documentation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-barbados"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tringlobe.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}