Delivery Room Errors and Birth Injury
Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for monitoring or communication errors to occur in the delivery room. This can lead to severe complications, missed signs of future complications, delayed treatment or delivery, birth injuries, and other devastating results. When medical professionals make delivery room errors, they are not acting in accordance with standards of care and are therefore committing medical malpractice. Delivery room errors can go unrecognized by the hospital, leaving you and your family to deal with the consequences of their negligent care. If this has happened to you, contact ABC Law Centers for a free consultation today. In fact, if you have a potential case, you would pay nothing throughout the legal process unless we win.
Transcript
MS. WALSH: You frequently won’t hear the term “delivery room error” from a hospital but what that means is it might mean that you have a nurse who is trying to cover three labor and delivery rooms and doesn’t have time to be in the room to watch your strips, to see how you’re doing. The monitor that they put on the mom records–lets you know how the baby is doing. If the nurse doesn’t have time to be in the room to watch, sometimes bad things happen when nobody is looking.
Frequently, nurses and doctors don’t communicate with each other. The nurse might see something in the room and relay it to a resident and somehow it never gets to the attending physician or it never gets to the doctor who is fully trained and nothing gets done. So we see many occasions where if people had acted faster and communicated with one another babies would be healthy.
Other examples of a delivery room, there might not be the appropriate equipment there. The appropriate doctor might not be there. The neonatologist or the pediatrician might not be called to the room when they should. There are some types of fetal monitors that have certain kinds of alarms on them and nurses aren’t trained properly and they think they’re monitoring the baby and they’re really monitoring the mom, the mom’s heartbeat instead of the baby’s.
It’s important if you think there might have been negligence by a doctor or a nurse that you contact an attorney right away for a couple of reasons. One, for adults, so if the mom is injured as part of the labor and delivery process, she only has two years to file a lawsuit and it takes some time to get records and get experts to evaluate the case so that you can file suit. For the baby, frequently it’s helpful to get the records earlier. People have a better memory shortly after an event than they do years later. So it’s important to go see an attorney quickly, so that you can start getting records and recording things while people still remember things.