The tragedy and the travesty

Baby who lost mother to swine flu dies in Spain

By DANIEL WOOLLS

MADRID (AP) — A glaring medical error claimed the life of a baby born prematurely to a woman who was the first person in Spain to die of swine flu, a hospital official said Monday.

The infant boy was delivered June 29 via Cesarean section as his 28-week-pregnant mother’s condition worsened. The 20-year-old Moroccan woman died the next day, and doctors later said the baby did not have swine flu.

The child died Monday after a member of the nursing staff at the neonatal care unit of Gregorio Maranon Hospital in Madrid fed the baby using the wrong technique, the hospital’s managing director Antonio Barba told a news conference.

On Sunday night, the child was fed baby formula intravenously, rather than through a tube as should have been the case, Barba said.

An hour after the feeding, hospital staff became aware of the mistake and tried to clean the baby’s blood, but could not save the child.

Barba called the error “very grave negligence and there is no excuse for it.”

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Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

This makes my blood boil. Even as an untrained layman, I know the difference between an intravenous drip and an NG tube. Did the nurse who committed the error even go to nursing school? Some reports state that the supervising nurse in the ICU was called away, leaving no one to supervise the nurse. As a result of the error, the baby suffered a deadly embolism and couldn’t be saved.

I simply cannot believe the laxity that allowed such a mistake to happen, in an environment where stepped up care is supposed to be the norm. A bag of formula looks vastly different from a bag of IV drugs, and even if the nurse is inexperienced, there is no excuse for such a mistake. It’s a sad, sad day for this baby’s family. May he and his mother rest in peace.