I’ve got an idea for a story, but I need to know, when someone dies in a hospital, what do they do with the body? Do all hospitals have morgues in them, and if so, where? My general guess is that they’re in the basement, but I don’t want to make any assumptions. And how long is it until they’re moved to another location? And are autopsies done there, or are they moved to another location as well?
All hospitals have a storage area for bodies, which is often (but not always) located in the basement. Every hospital I’ve ever been to also has a morgue for performing autopsies, but this is not necessarily in the same place as the cooler used for body storage (although it is usually close to it). Hope this helps!
artemis
Often the bodies are picked up from the hospital by the funeral home, and never go to the morgue at all. The hospital where I work has a morgue, but I’m not sure how often they perform autopsies there. The only autopsy cases I’ve dealt with belonged to the coroner, so they went to the county hospital.
My husband works part-time for a funeral home (doing “transfers” 
) and there** is** a central place at each hospital where bodies are picked up by the funeral home. Can’t have the funeral home guys tramping all through the hospital picking up stiffs, you know!
When someone dies, depending on the circumstances, the body is taken down to this receiving area and is picked up by the people from the FH, usually with a couple of hours.
I used to work in a hospital and had to carry out repair work in the morgue from time to time.
Our morgue was on the same floor level as the ambulance access, which made for a much easier system, especialy when RTA’s fatalities and survivors from the same incident were brought in,
Deads to the right, living to the left.
The emergency resuscitation room is also next to the morgue, I don’t know if the public knows this, it doesn’t inspire too much confidence.
There is no real reason for any morgue to be in the basement, and plenty of good ones for them to be at more accessible levels. it makes collection by undertakers much less trouble too, and visitors who may be required to identify John Does have an easier time of it.
Ventilation is a consideration, not all corpses are fresh, some arrive and are, well lets say you don’t want to be eating your packed lunch when say a river dredge corpse arrives.Now you would want to design the ventilation system to filter out noxious smells, which means a fair old bit of machinery but even after this it can still be a bit smelly, so the out-takes are usually high up on tallish stacks.
One thing to note though is that there are some strange folk in the world, as a result entry to the morgue area is tightly controlled, you cannot just walk right on in, even if you are bereaved, such folk go into the chapel of rest lobby and may be escorted to a viewing room, but they never get to go into the working area of the morgue itself.
If you ever have cause to be in a morgue, the smell isn’t usually anything to worry about, but keep the earplugs in when there’s an autopsy, apart from the gloopy noises its not very nice to hear the sound of an electric drill with a cutting disc fixing going about its work.