It is every parent’s nightmare.
You take your child to a health facility, seeking help over a relatively minor ailment, only to have them come back with a life changing injury that appears to have been as a result of negligence on the part of those meant to care for them.
Yesterday, we reported on the story of baby Lwandle, a three-week-old who was taken to the Bernice Samuel Hospital in Mpumalanga for a runny tummy only to end up having her hand amputated because of a potentially fatal infection caused by a drip.
What happened to the little girl is tragic.
It should make us all of us angry that ours is a healthcare system where those who depend on it are let down in the most horrific ways.
Baby Lwandle’s mother Mbali Sweleni said her alarm bells rang when she first saw a bloodied bandage on the floor next to an incubator that her daughter had been placed in on March 30.
She had been admitted just hours before.
On closer inspection, Sweleni saw her daughter had a deep wound on her right wrist which the nurses claimed had been caused by the baby ripping off the drip.
It is difficult to comprehend how a three-week-old baby could rip off a drip that would have been securely administered.
Nonetheless, the next day the wound had become so infected that the baby had to be transferred to the Witbank hospital where her hand was subsequently amputated.
The incident highlighted what residents protesting outside the Bernice Samuel Hospital this week said was a pattern of neglect and poor treatment of patients at the facility.
On Sunday, Mpumalanga premier Refilwe Mtshweni-Tsipane swiftly moved to visit the Lwandle's family.
She called for the suspension of the healthcare workers involved and her government has begun investigating the incident.
While this is welcome, it should be a first step of a comprehensive intervention needed at the facility.
A memorandum of demands from residents listed a litany of complaints about the kind of service patients are subjected to as well as previous incidents of alleged negligence by staff.
All these must be properly investigated.
Staff must be capacitated to deliver quality healthcare and where negligence has occurred there must be consequences for those responsible.
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