Newborn with head injuries undergoes successful surgery

Nov 08, 2015 News

The newborn baby, who sustained head injuries last Tuesday, just minutes after his birth at the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC), successfully underwent surgery to remove blood clots from the brain.
The surgery was done at the hospital on Friday and the baby boy is said to be doing well. Medical practitioners at the aforementioned hospital performed a craniotomy on the infant.
A craniotomy is the surgical removal of part of the bone from the skull to expose the brain. Medical instruments are used to remove the section of bone called the bone flap. The bone flap is temporarily removed, then replaced after the brain surgery has been performed.
The infant’s father, Akeem Balgobin, explained that the surgery was done to remove clots from the infant’s brain which was caused after a nurse allegedly dropped him in the maternity ward.
He said that his baby boy is now breathing on his own and he is breast-feeding.
The surgery was done after a CT-Scan revealed bleeding in the baby’s brain.
Minister of Public Health, Dr. George Norton, said that an investigation is underway to ascertain how the baby boy ended up falling.

The infant’s parents

He said that if the investigation reveals that the newborn baby fell as a result of negligence, action will be taken against the people involved. The nurse in question was sent on leave to facilitate the investigation.
There are reports that a nurse dropped the newborn, minutes after his mother delivered him, while another report suggests that the baby fell off a warming bed.
Kaieteur News also received information that the baby slipped out of a nurse’s hand while she was bathing him.
The mother, Pholmattie Ramjattan, told reporters that she went to the GPHC on Tuesday and by 07:30 hrs she had already delivered her baby.
“After I delivered, I was on the bed and the nurse who was cleaning me left saying that she going home. When she left I had to leave and go outside because they needed the bed to deliver another patient,” Ramjattan said.
She added that while waiting outside the delivery room, a male doctor approached and told her that one of the nurses had caused her baby to fall.
“When he said that, I went in to see and I see they had my baby wrapped and he was in a corner so I asked them why my baby not wearing clothes and they said that they have to take him to do a scan to see if any bones break because he get a hard fall.”
According to Ms. Ramjattan, she continued to try to find out what could have happened to her baby, but only got conflicting responses.
“One time I heard that the baby slipped out of the nurse’s hand while she was bathing him and another time I heard that the baby fell from the cot; then I am hearing, instead of putting the baby on the cot, the nurse dropped him,” the devastated mother said.
According to Mrs. Ramjattan, the nurse also told her that she had put the newborn on the cot and the child rolled off but the mother questioned how can the newborn baby move from one spot to another just minutes after birth.
The probe is still ongoing.