COROZAL TOWN, Mon. Jan. 7, 2019– An 11-month-old baby boy is in the morgue and his mother blames the Corozal Community Hospital for neglecting to treat her son promptly on New Year’s Day.
In an interview with 7News, the baby’s mother, Leah Miller, 28, said that her son, Deon Woodye, Jr., had diarrhea and was vomiting around midnight on January 1, so she went to the emergency room at the hospital. She then spoke to a nurse, who told her that there was no doctor available to attend to her child, so she would have to go to a clinic instead.
Miller said that at the clinic, she waited two hours before anyone addressed the baby’s condition. The doctor at the clinic then told her that they needed to go to the observation room, and once there, the nurse who was tending to the baby said that she could not find a vein. The nurse said the vein was already closed, and that the baby did not look well. They then took the baby back to the emergency room.
Once there, nurses started attending to the baby and gave him oxygen, then about 15 minutes later, Miller said, a nurse took the baby to the trauma room. Miller never saw her baby again, until the nurses told her that he was dead. After the autopsy, it was confirmed that the baby died of dehydration.
Miller said that she believed that if the hospital had attended to her child more promptly and attentively, specifically the nurse who turned her away, her baby might have lived.
Director of Health Care Services, Marvin Manzanero, said in the interview with 7News that he had been alerted to the case from the time it happened and has asked the management team at the hospital for an initial investigation. The investigation was conducted by the chief of staff, Jorge Sajia, and Manzanero said that he had already gotten the preliminary report.
The Director of Maternal and Child Health, Natalia Beer, then conducted a second peer review of the case. According to Manzanero, what he is trying to ascertain is what exactly occurred at the hospital and at what point did things take a turn for the worse.
He said that there may have been a case of misunderstanding in terms of what exactly the nurse told the patient’s mother, and he also said that the doctor might have been unaware that there was even a patient to be assessed. £