Durban -
A three-year-old has died at RK Khan Hospital in Chatsworth after she fell out of bed when the nurses were changing shift and her mother had been told to leave her bedside while the ward was cleaned.
Her parents, Rahima and Ekrum Mohammed from Tongaat, have asked the police to investigate.
They say they want answers so that what they have endured never happens to anybody else.
They believe it was the fall that caused the death of their only child, Zuhaira, who Rahima, 27, found bleeding and crying on the floor next to her bed. Staff in the ward ignored the crying child on the floor, her distraught mother alleged.
The results of an autopsy have not yet been made known.
The Department of Health was alerted by the Sunday Tribune and was still investigating at the time of going to print.
Zuhaira was admitted to the hospital after complaining of headaches last Friday and died on Saturday evening.
The Mohammeds say Zuhaira’s health deteriorated rapidly after the fall and that the previous night she had been playful and cheerful.
Zuhaira was checked for meningitis and had been given the all clear but was kept overnight for observation.
“My baby was okay that night. She played with me and then went to sleep. I was with her the entire night. Around 5.30am on Saturday the doctors woke all the mothers up and instructed us to leave the ward. I don’t even know why they did this,” said Rahima.
Rahima said shortly after she left, a doctor told her that the child was on the floor and that she must go into the ward and pick her up.
“I rushed into the ward and saw she had blood all over her face. She fell and nobody even bothered to help her.
“Her head was hurt but they just left her on the floor. I don’t even know how long she had been there,” Rahima said.
When she asked the nurses about what went wrong, she says they apologised and said they “were extremely busy”.
Rahima wiped the blood off her child and placed her back in the cot.
“I asked the doctor how could he leave my child on the floor, but he didn’t give me an answer. I was crying and called my husband to let him know what happened,” said Rahima.
Shortly afterwards Ekrum, 32, arrived at the hospital.
“He said I should go home and freshen up while he watched our daughter. In this time, her health went down. She started vomiting uncontrollably and again the nurses didn’t help. We asked one to change the bed sheet but instead of helping us a nurse flung the sheet on the bed and made us do it ourselves. Zuhaira went downhill from there. She was limp and pale and could barely move her body. We couldn’t stand to see her like that. She was dying right before our eyes,” said Rahima.
The child then went to sleep and wouldn’t wake up.
“The nurses tried to wake her and resuscitate her but it seems like she had lost consciousness. She was unresponsive. They immediately took her little body and said that they were going to do a CT scan to determine if the fall had caused any damage to her brain. I think my baby was already dead at this point.”
When Zuhaira was returned after doing the scan she was put on life support.
“We just stood there, praying for a miracle to happen. We were praying that our daughter would pull through this. While she was on the machine, the doctors continuously put pressure on us to pull the plug. They said that there was only one machine at the hospital and that we needed to make a decision quickly because others needed the machine too.
“The doctor eventually pulled the plug but, by then, she was already dead.”
“We can’t make sense of what happened. Our baby was our life. Judging by the massive turn-out at her funeral on Tuesday, we can tell that she was truly loved by everybody,” her father said.
Sunday Tribune