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N/A Hospital maternal death…Nurses say baby was strangled by umbilical cord

Nov 25, 2013 News

 

– but family says negligence!

A 26- year- old mother of Fort Ordnance Housing Scheme, East Canje, is accusing the nurses attached to Ward Nine (Maternity Ward) of the New Amsterdam Public Hospital of negligence for the death of her newborn baby. The explanation apparently given to the woman and her family was that the baby died of strangulation from the umbilical cord wrapped around its neck.
However, Shonnelle Kendell, 26, is adamant that her baby’s death could have been avoided and she is currently in terrible pain, both physical and emotional.
The woman explained that she was admitted to the hospital after 01:00hr on Friday with labour pains.
“I started to feel some pains and it intensified and I told the nurses [that] I was there and they didn’t tend to me—two of them!”
All of this, she claimed, took place in the labour room. “I was calling them but it was like my voice was not coming out,” she claimed.
The woman, speaking from her hospital bed on Saturday, claimed that she was trying to get the nurses’ attention to inform them that she was having immense difficulty breathing “and I was telling them that the baby was coming but they didn’t tend to me—until the other nurse came in and then they were ready to check.”
By then, she believed it was too late.
“The pain was coming and I couldn’t do anything about it and the nurses were telling me not to push and it appears that by the time she [the delivery nurse] had the baby out—I don’t know what really happened—I was in and out of consciousness…”
Kendell informed that the nurses left her and were attending to the baby with a lot of anxiety.
“Like 15 minutes after (10:30 hrs), they came back and told me that the baby died, and the cord was wrapped around its neck like about three times.”
Kendall stated that she saw her dead baby for a brief while “until they were ready to move the baby to the mortuary.”
The young mother said that the nurses “could have paid a little more attention to me and they would have been able to save the baby.”
Kendall’s mother, Maria Murray, was furious about the whole matter. She claimed to have spoken with the Nurse, who performed the delivery.
“And she said that the cord was wrapped around two times around her neck and when she clipped and cut one, the other one was tightly around the neck, so I told her that she could have unraveled it because it’s a norm for babies’ cords to be wrapped around and then she said she called for back-up and they tried and tried and that the baby had a minimal heartbeat and they tried to bring back it to a normal beat but the baby was dead after.”
The family is claiming that the child was a healthy one prior to the delivery.
“We have records from the ultra sound and all of a sudden she said that the baby’s cord wrapped around two times and then she said three times later—you know, she is not consistent with her explanation,” Murray lamented.
“We need to know what is going on! My daughter was going in and out of consciousness—she was panting for breath—calling them and they were not moving. If they (the nurses) had moved speedily when she was calling them, they could have saved that baby!”
The girl’s husband, Stephen, also vented his frustration.
“I think it’s their fault because they didn’t even want us to see the baby until hours later.”
The family is planning to take the matter to higher authorities. Efforts to contact the Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Berbice Regional Health Authority (BRHA), Michael Itwaru, proved futile. A post- mortem is to be performed on the baby today.

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