How mums ended up taking home wrong babies
SINGAPORE – Talk about a mother’s worst nightmare.
Just hours after reaching home from hospital with her newborn, a 31-year-old woman realised the baby boy might not be hers.
The boy had two name tags on his ankles – one had her particulars and the other had another woman’s.
Both mother and child were discharged from KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) at 7pm on Sunday.
When she called KKH an hour after the discovery, she was assured by a staff member that she went home with the right infant.
Still not convinced, she and her husband took the child back to the hospital for a blood test – just to be sure.
The blood test result at about 9.30pm was just as she feared.
Her brother-in-law told The New Paper that his sister-in-law’s blood type is A and his brother’s B. “The blood test results showed the baby’s blood type to be O. This confirmed that they had taken home the wrong child,” he said.
The couple were given the option of either taking the baby home first and taking him back the next day while the hospital conducted its search to locate her son; or leave him at the hospital. “We didn’t want anything else to go wrong, so we decided to let the baby remain at the hospital,” the brother-in-law said.
He added it was already 1am by the time they settled the child and the family left the hospital. “My sister-in-law was upset. It was understandable. Which mother wouldn’t be,” he said.
They also made a police report, “just in case we wanted to take out a civil suit later”, he said.
The mother and her family were at the police station when they received a call from KKH to return. “They said they had contacted the other family and they were making their way down to the hospital with the baby. That was when we rushed back there,” her brother-in-law said.
The family that took her son home on Sunday morning had removed the tags from his ankles without checking the name.
Both mothers had already breastfed the infants before the mistake was caught.
Source: The New Paper
Category: Community
