Wrong injection sends woman patient to ICU Young accident victim dies due to negligence Saudi Gazette report
QUNFUDAH — A spokesman for the Health Affairs Directorate in Qunfudah has admitted that a woman patient at the city's General Hospital was wrongly injected with Voltaren, causing her to be admitted in the intensive care unit until she was revived several hours later. Muntaser Bakhsh said the woman was now in a stable condition in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. F. Al Rahmani, the patient, was in the recovery room of Qunfudah General Hospital after a Caesarean operation, and her condition was stabilizing. According to her father, a lady doctor of Arab nationality dispensed a Voltaren injection to her, and moments later she felt tingling in her body, and a decrease in her heart beat, which necessitated the intervention of consultants. He questioned the decision to give his daughter a Voltaren injection, while she has asthma. The father added that the treating doctor never read the patient's medical file before dispensing the medicine. The Qunfudah General Hospital gained notoriety after a woman died recently while giving birth due to shoddy practices. In another case, Ahmed Al-Mufdali accused doctors at King Fahd Hospital in Al-Baha of neglecting his son aged one year and eight months, causing his death. The child was brought to the hospital following a traffic accident. The father called on the Ministry of Health to investigate the death of his child. He said that his son was involved in a car accident in Ghulwah province, and was taken by the Red Crescent to Ghulwah General Hospital where doctors decided to refer him to King Fahd Hospital in Al-Baha. After conducting medical tests and x-rays, he was left unattended in the general ward, when he should have been transferred to the pediatric intensive care unit, but the doctors refused to do so under the pretext that they had instructions. “The boy started having cramps, and the doctors were called, but they decided that it was normal, and that they knew their job,” the father said. After the deterioration of his son's condition, the doctors decided to move the boy to the adults' intensive care unit, where they conducted a CT scan and found that he had a swelling in the brain. He died a few hours later because of neglect and indifference, the father charged. He is calling for an investigation of those responsible, asserting that he would submit a complaint to the Emir of the region after the funeral and mourning. The Director of King Fahd Hospital in Al-Baha, Ghurmallah Sadran, said that the case had been investigated and the committee has submitted its findings to the ministry. In yet another case of medical malpractice in recent weeks, a father in Madinah was called on the phone two hours after leaving the hospital where his son was being hospitalized. The attending male nurse asked him to immediately come to the hospital. The nurse wanted to clear himself before the hospital's management, which accused him of giving a wrong medicine to the boy, a local newspaper reported. Muhammad Al-Jahani said his seven-year-old son Rayan was admitted in the hospital with a cut to his tongue. He said the emergency surgeon immediately took him to the operation theater where he stitched the injury under general anesthesia. Following the operation he was kept in a room under observation in the surgery ward. He said his son was discharged on the same day, but a male nurse telephoned him in the evening asking him to visit the hospital. When he reached, the hospital's technical director asked him about the discharge sheet and prescription. He said that a nurse had given him the prescription. “At this point the director asked me to hand him the report and prescription. But I refused to give him the discharge order and the medicine as I began to suspect that the nurse gave my son a wrong medicine.” He said he directly went to the shift manager to report the incident but to his dismay the manager told him that the mistake was a simple one although his son was given a dose of the wrong medicine. Al-Jahani said what happened to his son was nothing but negligence on the part of the hospital's staff and the medicine would have endangered his son's life. When the hospital's management did not take any action against the erring nurse he lodged a complaint with the Directorate of Health Affairs in Madinah. He said the mistake was not a simple one as the hospital's management claimed, as the consequences could have been fatal. “Realizing the extent of danger such mistakes could pose, I raised the matter with the highest health authority in the region to take measures to prevent the recurrence of such malpractice,” Al-Jahani said. Abdul Razak Hafez, Director of Public Relations and Media at the Directorate of Health Affairs in Madinah, said the complaint was referred to the hospital's director. He said the mistake was unintentional as the nurse in the ward gave the child a wrong medicine prescribed to another patient in the ward suffering from the same symptoms. He said when the hospital authorities discovered the mistake it called the patient's father and informed him about the mistake and was asked to come to the hospital to get the right medicine.
