Cremation services for fetuses (>20 EGA). I swear there's a question in here. : )

Published Apr 2, 2015

371 Posts

Specializes in many.

POST JUST ONE COMMENT ABOUT TERMINATION OR PERSONAL NEGATIVE POV AND I'LL WHIP THIS POST DOWN. PLEASE -I NEED IDEAS.

Politics, politics.

Our facility provides free cremation services for pregnant women who deliver babies that die before or after birth. These families are not provided any cremains after the procedure is complete.

I now know that the services are not free to our facility. We pay a local crematory less than the cost of the fuel. Because the crematory is losing money in providing this service, there is no set time frame for completion of the procedure and there is no process for returning the cremains to the families.

Because our morgue transfers the remains to the crematory in a group the thought was that the remains were cremated in the same fashion, but that misinformation has been cleared up through recent conversations. By state law the remains must be cremated individually.

For a privately paid cremation the fee can be anywhere from $500-$1000, depending on the gestational age at death. Therefore if we begin an in house process for returning remains to families the local funeral homes will lose the money they are making from the very few families who can afford to pay for it on their own. Also, the department from whose budget the cremations are paid does not want to ask for more money in their budget because it will increase the work for that department.

I am thinking about calling upon our patient and family experience folks to help me make this happen and asking our Labor and Delivery nurses if they are willing to help with the chain of custody concerns.

What does your facility do, how do you get remains back to families who ask for it?