Family Gets Settlement From Hospital After Baby Falls From NICU Crib

The first days at home with a newborn baby are overwhelming.  In their first months of life, human infants are so fragile, and the simplest functions of life require arduous work from multiple caregivers.  Babies know when they are hungry, but they do not always easily take milk when it is offered to them, even if, a minute ago, they were enthusiastically sucking on pacifiers.  If you don’t swaddle the baby, his arms will drift aimlessly like they did in utero, and the baby will soon wake up upset that he has to wave his arms around in cold air instead of warm water.  Newborns even need constant attention when they sleep, because sometimes they forget to breathe.  You wish you could employ an entire staff of nurses to ensure that the baby is safe at all times until she makes it through the so-called fourth trimester and begins to develop survival instincts.  When a new baby is in the hospital, monitored by humans and machines, the least you would expect is that the hospital staff would be able to prevent babies who are too young to crawl or walk from accidental falls.  If your baby got injured in a preventable accident before coming home from the hospital, contact a Columbia medical malpractice lawyer.

Nurse Failed to Secure Baby’s Crib Railing

In December 2023, Brittani and Cornelius Burroughs received a $475,000 settlement from Medical University of South Carolina, pursuant to a nursing malpractice claim.  The family lives in Williamsburg, but Brittani Burroughs gave birth at MUSC on the advice of her doctors, who had diagnosed the baby with a heart defect which required surgery.  MUSC is the South Carolina hospital best equipped to perform heart surgery on newborns.

The baby was born in January 2015 at MUSC and underwent two surgeries during her first month of life.  During this time, she had several ultrasounds of her head, and they all showed normal results.  When the baby was a month old, two days before she was scheduled to go home from the hospital, she fell from her crib in the nursery, because a nurse had forgotten to close her crib and accidentally pulled on the monitoring wires attached to the baby.  She fell three feet, hitting the back of her head.

The baby was diagnosed with intraventricular bleeding in the brain, which required another surgery to correct.  She went home from the hospital in March, when she was two months old, but after that, she needed another surgery and continued to suffer neurological symptoms.  The child is now nine years old, and the Live 5 news website did not include any information about her current state of health.  The South Carolina Insurance Reserve Fund paid the family the $475,000 settlement.

Let Us Help You Today

The medical malpractice lawyers at the Stanley Law Group can help you if your child suffered a serious injury because of an error by nurses in the newborn nursery.  Contact The Stanley Law Group in Columbia, South Carolina or call (803)799-4700 for a free initial consultation.

Source:

live5news.com/2023/12/07/family-gets-475k-after-baby-suffers-brain-damage-lowcountry-hospital/