MORTUARY BILLING SYSTEM
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
A morgue or mortuary (in a hospital or elsewhere) is used for the storage of human corpses awaiting identification or removal for autopsy or disposal by burial, cremation or other method. In modern times corpses have customarily been refrigerated to delay decomposition. Mortuary early 14c., from Anglo-French mortuarie “gift to a parish priest from a deceased parishioner,” from Medieval Latin mortuarium, noun use of neuter of Late Latin adjective mortuarius “pertaining to the dead,” from Latin mortuus, pp. of mori “to die” (see mortal (adj.)). Meaning “place where bodies are kept temporarily” first recorded 1865, a euphemism for earlier English term “deadhouse.” Morgue from the French morgue, which means ‘to look at solemnly, to defy’. First used to describe the inner wicket of a prison, where new prisoners were kept so that jailers and turnkeys could recognize them in the future, it took on its modern meaning in fifteenth-century Paris, being used to describe part of the Châtelet used for the storage and identification of unknown corpses (Assmann, 2005).
The dead arrive at all hours of the day, zipped into body bags and delivered to a white-tiled room called mortuary. The routine is the same no matter the name on the tag. The time is noted. The body is weighed. An autopsy is scheduled. A life is over, but the work here is just beginning. And so are the costs to taxpayers. Money isn’t the biggest concern at the morgue, not for the staff and certainly not for the families whose relatives are brought here but its proper documentation is important. But every new arrival carries costs that most people never see, from N1000 body bags and N150,000 DNA tests to the N200,000 payment of the pathologist who performs the autopsy. (Gillespie, 2002)
At the morgue, death is both a personal tragedy and a public burden. Mortuary attendants spend more than N4 million a year to keep it running, and the price keeps going up. Most of those costs aren’t negotiable because the state requires special coroners to investigate fatal accidents, homicides and any other death that police or doctors consider “unnatural.” Last year, more than 1,000 such cases came through the morgue’s doors, a 15 percent increase from just five years ago. It depends. If someone is hit by a car, a long investigation probably isn’t needed to determine the cause of death. But if drugs are involved, or murder charges are possible, the investigation and the expense can grow dramatically.
Chapter three is concerned with the system analysis and design. It presents the research methodology used in the development of the system, it analyzes the present system to identify the problems and provides information on the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed system. The system design is also presented in this chapter.
Chapter four presents the system implementation and documentation, the choice of programming language, analysis of modules, choice of programming language and system requirements for implementation.
Chapter five focuses on the summary, constraints of the study, conclusion and recommendations are provided in this chapter based on the study carried out.
1.7 Definition of Terms
Mortuary: a place where dead bodies are stored prior to burial or cremation.
Embalm: To treat a corpse
Funeral: A ceremony to honour and remember a deceased person
Bill: Amount charged for a service
Autopsy: An activity performed to find out the cause of death.