A 31-year-old woman has accused Nakuru Level Five Hospital of swapping her newborn with a dead one.
Ms Alice Adhiambo said she checked into the facility on May 21 and was admitted after medics reported that she had high blood pressure, thereby placing her and her unborn baby in danger.
“I remained at the hospital until May 29 when I delivered at around 4 pm through caesarean section. My baby boy weighed 2.6 kilogrammes at birth and was feeding normally. I spent the day with him on Saturday and Sunday,” said Adhiambo.
According to the Standard, details on the Newborn Unit Exit Form indicated that “the child was born pre-term at 31 weeks and 5 days as compared to 40 weeks for normal delivery.”
The distraught mother said she went to breastfeed her child at 6 pm on Sunday and left the nursery at around 7:30 pm, hoping to check on the baby again by 9 pm.
“At 9pm, I left my bed heading to the nursery. There I met two nurses who asked me where the name tag on my child had gone yet I had left it intact. My baby too was not in his bed,” she said.
Adhiambo said the nurses then told her that her baby had died after which she demanded to see the body.
“My child had unique hair close to the forehead. I was shown an already wrapped baby whose body colour had turned almost green. The dead child had a birthmark on the face while mine had none. The body was too cold to have died minutes earlier,” said Adhiambo.
Attempts to get an explanation on the circumstances under which her baby died were futile.
But the hospital’s medical superintendent Dr Joseph Mburu denied the allegations.
“There was nothing like a baby swap. The document in our possession clearly show that the child was born pre-term,” said the doctor.
The following day, as Adhiambo was settling her bill, the distressed mother noticed that she had been given a different file as a record for her child.
“At the accountant’s desk, the patient number on the form gave the record of a patient named John Ng’ang’a. That was neither me nor my son,” she said.
Dr Mburu admitted that there were some errors on the records but the inpatient number belonged to Adhiambo.
“If the child was not hers, we shall have a DNA conducted to establish the truth of the matter,” the medical superintendent said.
Adhiambo who works as a security guard in Nakuru town said the torment has been hard for her to bear, Standard reports.
She added that her husband was held up in Mombasa due to the cessation of movement because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
