We sympathise and empathise with the family for the loss of their baby, but we have investigated the issue and as far as we are concerned, there was no negligence on the part of the nurses.
The Lagos State chapter of the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) has debunked claims that the death of a baby belonging to the Imbuls, at the Randle General Hospital, Mother and Child Care Unit was as a result of negligence on the part of nurses.
Kelvin Dooyum Imbul, and his wife, Mimi Rufina Imbul, had taken to social media last week to decry the alleged negligence on the part of nurses at Randle General Hospital, Mother and Child Care Unit, Gbaja Surulere, Lagos, which led to the death of their two-month-old twin daughter, Zoe.
But speaking with SaharaReporters on Monday, the Lagos State secretary of the association, Toba Odumosu, said the baby was sick and died as a result of complications.
According to him, the baby had been admitted at the hospital for two days and was well catered for by nurses before the unfortunate incident.
He said, "As a council of nurses, we sympathise and empathise with the family for the loss of their baby, but we have investigated the issue and as far as we are concerned, there was no negligence on the part of the nurses.
"The child was admitted on Wednesday of that week, and nurses cared for the child. The proximity of where the baby was being nursed to the nurses’ stand was close; there was no reason why a nurse would be on duty and not attend to the child.[story_link align="left"]89087[/story_link]
"For the nurses there, it's a labour loss; when you care for a patient and eventually, you lose the patient. Nobody is happy with that kind of outcome. On the part of the nurses, they did all they were supposed to do.
"The child was brought to the hospital because the child was sick, the child had a twin and the other one was not brought to the hospital. It was because one was thriving and the other one wasn't, so, we understand that people grieve differently and when things like this happen, we've been trained to expect sometimes that people will not be able to take such situations. We just see it from that angle that she (the mother) was not just able to accept the outcome.
"And they had queried some sort of congenital issues, so that's it, not that the baby was not well cared for. But we understand from our training that people will be people and we all react to issues differently so we just see it as an outburst of a mother, it was not because the child was not cared for."
In a post on Instagram, the mother of the children, Mimi, had said she went to run a test on her child at the hospital, only to have her killed.
In tears, she said, "You will give me my baby, if not, you people will kill me in this hospital. You don't know what I went through before I gave birth to these children.
"They are busy telling me that my BP (blood pressure) will rise. Which kind of life are we living in Nigeria? I begged this nurse yesterday, she sent me away. She said I was disturbing (her) too much. I said ‘Madam, please call the doctor’. She said there was no doctor available at that time."
She was seen telling other patients to go to another hospital.
The father of the child said, “We woke up on Wednesday morning and my wife said our baby wasn’t eating well again so we took her to the hospital. The doctor examined her and said she was ok but that they would run a blood test to confirm if there was an infection.
"Shortly after they took blood from her, my daughter cried for two hours nonstop. We called the attention of the doctor (to her) and they rushed her to the ER and placed her on oxygen.
"She was responding very well not until Friday; the doctor came in and asked my wife to breastfeed her because she was stable for breastfeeding. After she was breastfed, my baby started crying and my wife ran to the nurses to tell them to please come to check our daughter but instead, they sent her away, telling her she was disturbing them too much.
"My wife begged them with tears that please she could not understand her daughter but they neglected her. It was after the baby gave up and my wife started crying that they came to check her but by this time. she was far gone already.”
The couple claimed they met a dead baby on one of the beds and the nurses were not aware of that.
"They didn't know the baby was dead and the nurses were just here tapping (fiddling with) their phones," the couple said.