Chennai: Hospital's negligence, quack treatment leads to 9-yr-old's death

Chennai: “I will come to the hospital only if you buy me a chocolate”, Hemalatha told her father when he was trying to prepare the nine-year-old for the trip to the Institute of Child Health and Hospital for Children in Egmore on Friday morning.

The chocolate did not help to cheer the fourth class girl as she died in the hospital the following day. Doctors told the family from Ponneri it was meningitis, brain fever.

“The doctors at the Ponneri general hospital could have saved my child. They delayed starting the right treatment. Even after the blood samples were checked, they kept saying she was normal and made us treat her normal, sending her to school and giving her the usual food. And then it became too late when we rushed her here”, said the child’s father Anbumani, fighting back tears.

Hemalatha died at 0130 hours Friday-Saturday night and after the usual hospital ritual, the family took the body back home in Ponneri in the evening for the last rites.

Barely 48 hours earlier, the girl was a bundle of life—despite the temperature and fatigue. “She was very active till about four in the (Friday) evening, chatting with her sister and asking us for food. There was no indication she was at the threshold of death”, sobbed her mother.

While the family blamed the Ponneri GH for her death, it appears that precious time was lost in getting Hemalatha attended by a quack during the initial period.

“The girl developed fever on August 24 and the family first took her to a quack and later to a private hospital. She was taken to the Ponneri GH on August 29 where the doctors did preliminary investigation and told them to come back the next morning. They did not turn up”, said State Coordinator of National Rural Health Mission Dr S Srinivasan at the Egmore ICH, elaborating on the fatal mistakes that families sometimes commit while handling their kids’ fevers—first the quacks, then street-corner clinics and ill-equipped labs and only later, the competent hospital—by which time it often got too late.

“By the time Hemalatha was taken to the Minjur hospital on September 2, she had already developed shock and convulsions, which meant acute central nervous infection. When she arrived at the ICH on Friday afternoon, she was in a bad shape and was taken into the emergency. We did our best”, Dr Srinivasan told DC.

Denying rumours that Hemalatha died due to dengue, he said her blood platelet count was normal whereas the count would drop for dengue.