UK funeral homes take the weight

For some time now we have been warning people in the medical profession about the dangers of handling obese patients. The growing bariatric problem means that many paramedics, nurses and hospital porters risk injuring themselves when transporting patients.
That’s why we have developed a wide range of bariatric equipment, from chairs to trolleys, to take the strain of people backs.
It was interesting to read then that the UK’s growing obesity problem is now impacting on funeral directors and morticians.
This week several newspapers ran a story about a Ken funeral director who has been forced to spend £40,000 on “super-sizing” his business to cope with increasingly obese ‘clients’.
John Weir is believed to be the first funeral home owner in Britain to take the drastic measure. Mr Weir, who has been a funeral director for 40 years, has installed a hoist that can lift 50 stone, widened doorways and bought wider, reinforced steel trolleys, jumbo-sized fridges and bigger gowns.
Some of the bodies are so large, health and safety laws mean they cannot be carried to their funerals. So the undertaker had to buy reinforced trollies to wheel the coffins into the church or crematorium.
Hospital morgues and crematoriums across Britain have already made alterations — including super-sized furnaces, to cope with the nation’s expanding waistline.
Mr Weir told how one dead person weighed 31 stone. And he said: “Over the last five years there has been a serious rise in the number of obese people we are arranging funerals for. Sometimes we can have two obese funerals to deal with a week and it was becoming a problem fitting their bodies into our mortuary fridges.
“We also have to take people’s weight into account when we organise services as usually if someone is obese, they can’t be carried into a chapel or church by their loved ones or pallbearers.
“Everything has to be bigger, the chapel doors have been widened, we’ve had to buy wider, longer and sturdier trolleys and even have to get bigger shrouds and gowns.”
Statistics show just over a quarter of adults in the UK are now classified obese, up from 21 per cent in 2000.
Hospital admissions where the primary diagnosis is obesity have skyrocketed from 1,054 in 2000/01 to 11,574 in 2010/11.
We will shortly be writing a more detailed piece on how to avoid injuries in the funeral home and offer some insight into our new products that will assist funeral directors and morticians – so watch this space.