The Queensland government will launch an investigation to understand how an outback hospital misplaced the body of a respected Aboriginal elder, leading to an empty coffin being buried at the man’s funeral.
Several hundred people attended the funeral of the Gangalidda elder S Douglas in Doomadgee last week, many travelling hundreds of kilometres from other towns in north Queensland.
They believed they were seeing his body being lowered into the ground at the cemetery, but the coffin was empty. The grave was exhumed on Tuesday after Douglas’s body was discovered in the morgue at Doomadgee hospital.
The Gangalidda leader Murrandoo Yanner, who spoke on behalf of the family, said relatives were devastated when they heard about the error.
“It’s just a feeling of anger, hopelessness, bewilderment,” he said.
“It’s not rocket science. There’s the body. There’s the coffin. Your job is to put the body in the coffin.”
Yanner claimed there was an “entrenched systemic racism” at Doomadgee hospital and believed this played a part in the mix-up.
“Why are we treated as second-class citizens and not given the same duty of care anyone in a mainstream hospital would receive,” he said.
“There is a systemic racism, decades old, that is just entrenched in Doomadgee and it needs to be rooted out by Queensland Health.”
The health minister, Shannon Fentiman, described the mistake as “completely unacceptable” and promised Queensland Health would undertake an internal investigation “to ensure this never happens again”.
“I apologise for the hurt and distress this has caused the family. The entire Doomadgee community deserves better,” she said.
“It is vitally important to me that this community can trust their health system. Mistakes like this undermine that trust.”
Fentiman said health authorities had already taken steps to increase oversight and improve administrative processes at the hospital.
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The family of Douglas, who was one of the oldest elders in his community, now planned to hold a second funeral.
But this was not the first time the hospital had let the community down, Yanner said.
In a report released in June, the Queensland coroner blamed racism and a lack of cultural competency for the avoidable deaths of three Aboriginal young people who had presented to the hospital with rheumatic heart disease.
Yvette Booth was repeatedly given Panadol before she died, despite a doctor’s recommendation the teenager be given weekly checkups and urgent surgery for her diagnosed condition.
Fentiman said she was committed to implementing all 17 of the coroners’ recommendations.
Yanner said the community had lost faith in the hospital and many choose to travel more than an hour to Burketown for healthcare instead.
He said nothing had changed at the hospital since those three deaths.
“After all those deaths – clearly preventable – people should have not only been sacked or removed from the hospital, they should be sacked from the health service. And I think that’s the steps that government needs to take.”
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