Catastrophic injury to a baby due to negligent prenatal care.
Prenatal care is supposed to help both mother and baby. But when hospitals, clinics and doctors don't follow up on test results, lab tests and other important information, the harm to the baby can be devastating.
A common urinary tract infection led to premature rupture of the mother's membranes and spontaneous delivery of a severely premature infant. If the hospital had diagnosed the UTI and treated it with simple antibiotics, the pregnancy would have been extended and baby allowed to develop.
The hospital made things worse by not administering steriods, or betamethasone, to the mom to promote fetal lung maturity (because the lungs had not developed to the point the baby could breathe on his own yet). Administering steroids to the mother has been the standard of care since the early 1990s - and not following this established patient safety rule was malpractice in D.C.
