A formal complaint has been made against a doctor at Al-Ahsa's Children's and Maternity Hospital who said that the breaking of a pregnant woman's waters was “not a sure sign of going into labor” in a first pregnancy, and whose subsequent failure to attend to the woman allegedly led to the death of her child. The woman's husband, Fahd Aal Mohammed, said he took his wife to the hospital after she appeared to be going into labor but when they entered the emergency section the doctor – a woman of Arab nationality – refused to see her, citing “specific signs of labor” after which she could be seen. “We had to go home as the doctor told us to, but my wife's pain increased, and the signs the doctor told us to watch for still did not appear,” Aal Mohammed said. “We went back to the hospital when they'd changed shifts and a different doctor examined my wife and told us that the child had died in the womb due to a lack of oxygen.” “The doctor reprimanded us for coming to the hospital so late, saying we should have come in the morning, and I told her that we had but that her colleague refused to see my wife,” he said. Aal Mohammed said that his wife had been regularly scanned during what was a “normal and healthy” pregnancy. “It's the doctor's fault and she should be punished,” he said. A doctor at the hospital said the case would be looked into.
