When hospital policy caused a baby grievous bodily harm

Can you imagine something like the following real-life sorry tale in this post happening to your loved one?

Get this story. The investigative evening news on the local television station reported just this week that a 2 or 3-year-old girl had to have her lower right arm amputated because of both hospital negligence and policy.

The negligence part revolves around how long a tourniquet was actually left on the little girl’s arm.

The protracted dispute about this niggling fact stems mainly from the hospital claiming it was left in place for only a few hours, while the mother of the baby said on national television that it was kept all night long.

The policy half of the issue comes from the hospital refusing to allow the mother of the baby to stay overnight to tend to her little girl’s needs.

Had the mother been permitted to stay the night, she would have ensured that the nurse, who left the tourniquet tied in place to come back later to retry because she could not find a vein on the baby’s arm from which to get a blood sample for a laboratory test, did not leave the constricting medical tool in place long enough to turn the lower half of the baby’s arm black from a lack of adequate blood supply to the tissue in the extremities of the affected limb.

Whew! Well that was certainly very long winded: I warned you I had a lot to say earlier on! Seriously though, as sad as all that may be, it gets even worse.

The management of this pioneering hospital – I will not mention any names for both legal and private reasons – showed a rather warped sense of justice by half-heartedly talking remorselessly about compensation in general terms, I thought.

Those terms included just paying the family’s apartment rent for a year and providing a prosthetic arm for the baby free of charge. Oh wow! How much more generous can somebody else get?

By the way, the only thing the hospital actually has done so far is to pay the rent, according to the mother.

From looking at the baby’s completely healed arm on the screen, I could infer that the events depicted above must have occurred several months ago and were just coming to light only now.

I am not a betting man, but I can predict that it will not be long before a heavyweight legal icon offers the family his/her free legal advice freely.

Have you ever witnessed such horrendous injustice in your own life? Should a hospital separate a mother and a sick baby admitted overnight?