…family says negligent system caused his death

A TWO-year-old baby boy on Wednesday morning lost his life, after he was stung by a scorpion at his Mabaruma home.

According to reports, the child, Romero Lucian, was admitted at the Mabaruma Hospital on Wednesday morning, after he started vomiting severely as a result of the scorpion sting.

A close relative of the child said that he was admitted in a stable condition, and was given gravol for the vomiting, and saline and oxygen. However, there was no antidote at the hospital for the poison, only medications to ease the pain. “That was all they had, and they said that he would have to go to Georgetown Hospital. So they told his mom to go back home and come back around 12:00hrs to catch a flight to go down.

But the plane never came till around 15:00hrs, and got to town [sometime] after 16:00hrs,” the relative said.
The relative further added that there were other planes leaving the region before the other plane arrived, but the situation was not treated with much urgency. The relative said when the plane arrived at Ogle, there was a further delay, because there was no ambulance there to collect and start treating the child.

It was when the ambulance came and moved off from the airport, the child’s grandmother saw him take his last breath. “When we arrived at the hospital at the emergency unit, that’s when they pronounced him dead,” the relative said. The family believes if the situation was treated with more urgency and interest in saving a life, the baby would have still been alive.

“The first issue was that the hospital is not fully equipped to save lives, then there was a negligent system in how they treated the case. First thing the plane took long to come, and they had other planes there to use. Then there was no ambulance waiting there at the airport so that means there was no proper coordination in the health system,” another relative lamented. Now the family is left grieving at the innocent loss of the baby’s life.