Couple bays for nurse’s blood at St John’s over baby’s death

A young couple in Mzuzu has expressed discontentment with the manner St John’s Hospital management in Mzuzu handled circumstances that led to the untimely death of their first born daughter Michelle on Friday.

Justice and Tiwonge, 25 and 26 years respectively, say their daughter fell off a hospital bed due to the negligence of a female nurse on duty.

According to Justice Mtonga, the husband, her wife was admitted to the hospital at around 9pm on 28th April after she had started showing labour experiences.

“The following morning at around 7 am I went to check on her but my mother in-law said she had not yet put to bed. I went back home, but just a few minutes after my arrival at around 9 am I received a phone call that Michelle was born.

“I immediately rushed to the hospital to see my daughter as any happy dad would. But upon my arrival at the hospital I was told I could not see my baby as she was on life support machine (oxygen), and when I asked how they said she hit the floor as my wife was trying to climb the bed,” Mtonga told Nyasa Times.

He said the nurse attending to her left her all alone struggling to climb to the top of the bed when time for Tiwonge to deliver the baby had come, and in the process of delivery the baby fell to the floor whilst crying helplessly.

Tiwonge’s mother, Emily Nkhoma, told Nyasa Times that she was at the time outside the labour ward as a guardian but when she heard the baby’s wails she went in only to find her granddaughter lying on the floor and her daughter struggling to pick her up from the floor.

The nurse supposed to be attending to her was nowhere in sight.

Narrated Joseph Mtonga: “My mother-in-law then shouted for help at that is the time when the nurse who was sleeping on the job rushed in and started working on my baby girl. On several occasions I went to the nurses’ offices to report on how my daughter was fairing but they lied she was way too far from giving birth.

“Later around 5pm or thereabout we were told the baby was no more. It pained me because the supposed nurse seemed not to be concerned at all according to my mother-in-law.”

Nkhoma says the nurses said Michelle died due to improper feeding which, as family, they do not agree to. Nyasa Times could not get hold of St John’s Hospital management as the nurses we talked to said they were not in a position to comment on such a matter.

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