The joy of an Abuja-based family became tears after the death of their newborn baby at the Kubwa General Hospital, Abuja, due to alleged negligence.
It was gathered that the baby died after the nurse on duty allegedly refused to attend to the mother, Mrs Blessing Okwor, when she arrived at the hospital.Okwor said she got to the hospital around 4pm and the nurse checked her but said she was only two-centimetre dilated and needed to be 10cm before she could put to bed.
“She asked me to go home and return at 10pm. When it was 10pm, we came back but she didn’t touch me. She said I wasn’t close to giving birth. Again, she asked me to go back and come in four hours.“When we returned four hours later, she touched my tummy while I was still standing. She said I was not ready to give birth and that I should come back in another four hours. Then I left the hospital.
“When my water broke around 2.36am, I was taken back to the hospital. I told her that my water had broken and I was vomiting. I told her I was tired and losing strength. She didn’t touch me; she said I should go and I wasn’t close to giving birth.
“I told her I couldn’t walk again. She asked me to lie on a bed in the delivery room. She didn’t touch me, everywhere was open and mosquitoes were many.
“Nobody was with me; I had to stand to go outside to meet my husband and sister that went with me to the hospital. My husband asked them to give me a bed but they refused because I was not their patient; then we left,” she added.
The woman said shortly after she got home, her condition became critical and she was rushed back to the hospital.
“This was around 6am the next day. She asked me to lie down but nobody attended to me until another nurse asked her to assist me. That was when she came to me and noticed that I was due.
“She was standing and asking me to push. I pushed once; she didn’t ask me to push again as she used scissors to cut me.
Another nurse told her she would have allowed me to push at least five times before cutting me.“The other nurse and another cleaner helped me to push and my baby came out,” she added.
The baby was said to have died around 2am on Tuesday, August 2, 2022.Okwor, who fought back tears while speaking to our correspondent, said she had yet to recover from the shock of her baby’s death.
She said, “When the baby came out, the next thing I heard was that the baby pooed inside me and drank dirty water.
They placed him on oxygen and were treating him but I was complaining that if she (the nurse) had attended to me when I came, this wouldn’t have happened. She then said it’s not her fault that my baby didn’t make it.”
The Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Dr Muideen Lasisi, while sympathising with the woman, said only God determines what happens during childbirth.He said,
“The word medical negligence is what you feel should have been done and they didn’t do but there are two sides to it. Not even two sides in the context of how you are seeing it; the two sides in the context of the person that is alleging, so the person has to be very specific about what exactly she’s talking about.
“These two sides are conflict-prone because what you think is right might actually be right to other people and the judgment of what is wrong is not a public judgment and it has to be professional judgment by people that do such a thing.”When asked why the nurse cut Okwor after the first push, Lasisi said,
“Madam, I am telling you that these things are medical procedures. How they do it is training, people are trained to do it. If they need to cut, they’ll cut, if they don’t need to cut, they’ll leave it.
Cutting during delivery is a normal process; it’s part of the process of delivery, especially for people giving birth for the first time.”
