Committee to probe why a baby was wrongly declared dead: Nasim

Health Minister Mohammed Nasim has said he has formed a committee and asked its members to find those responsible for wrongly declaring a newborn dead at Dhaka Medical College Hospital.

“I have asked them to tell me in three days who is responsible for this,” Nasim said at a roundtable organised by bdnews24.com at the National Press Club in Dhaka on Wednesday in partnership with Unicef.

The health minister, top UN officials and public health experts joined the discussion to find ways to keep every newborn alive in Bangladesh.

Speaking on the DMCH incident, Nasim said his ministry would take action against the guilty.

 

The DMCH had earlier opened an investigation into the shocking incident in which a newborn baby declared dead by her doctor was later found alive.

The baby girl was admitted to Dhaka Shishu Hospital on Monday after she started moving during a bath before burial at the Azimpur Graveyard. The baby died after a day of survival.

bdnews24.com Editor-in-Chief Toufique Imrose Khalidi, who moderated the discussion at the National Press Club, first asked the director general for health services Prof Abul Kalam Azad to explain the incident.

“It’s sad. We cannot accept that,” Azad said.

President of Bangladesh Paediatric Association Prof Mohammed Shahidullah who introduced neonatology in Bangladesh in the early 1990s said the doctors could take time to declare the baby dead.

“People should take time to declare the death of a newborn,” he said, adding that the baby was premature. The outcome was not good and they die in 80 percent cases.”

“But to declare the newborn deaths, they should have taken at least half an hour.”