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Unfortunately, Candice Pretorius knows the piercing pain of losing a baby while nurses ignore cries for help and refuse to believe that you are suddenly in labour.
The 23-year-old woman from Johannesburg went into spontaneous, premature labour earlier this month. At the time, she was about five months pregnant with her first child.
Pretorius was rushed to Edenvale General Hospital, where she alleges that nurses ignored her and continued with what they were doing, despite her telling them she was in labour. After a while, she says, one of the nurses finally decided to come to her aid.
“I told her I had been screaming with pain and calling for help, but nobody came to help me. I told her my baby was too small for me to give birth and she needed to give me something to stop the pain.”
Pretorius says she was given two injections, but it was too little, too late for her unborn baby.
The baby girl she gave birth to was placed in an incubator, but she died soon afterwards.
Pretorius believes her baby would have survived if the nurses had checked whether her lungs were clean and functioning optimally.
She also claims that when the hospital staff realised that the baby was about to die, there were no real attempts to resuscitate her.
The Saving Babies report compiled by the Medical Research Council identified inadequate resuscitation at district level as a contributor to neonatal deaths.
