Florida

Department of Children & Families

Florida hospital ignores pregnant mental patient’s pleas, and tragedy ensues

 

A baby was born with severe brain damage after caregivers at the state’s largest mental hospital dismissed a woman’s cries for help.

cmarbin@MiamiHerald.com

Admission records indicated the woman could have been 27-weeks pregnant when she entered the hospital the first week in October — which means she could well have been full-term by late December.

The woman began complaining she felt ill as early as 3 a.m. on Dec. 23 — the Friday before a long Christmas weekend, records show.

Though the inspector general report is heavily redacted, making it difficult to piece events together, it is clear she informed caregivers before 7:30 p.m. she believed she was in labor and needed an ultrasound.

At 7:28 p.m., the woman called 911. The woman told a dispatcher “[I’m] feeling a lot of pressure and I just asked the nursing staff if they could give me an ultrasound to see how low it is and if I’m in labor, and I’m having a lot of discomfort.”

“They told me ain’t nothing gonna happen till Tuesday,” she said.

But when the dispatcher spoke with her caregiver, McMillian, he suggested she was receiving all the care she needed. “This is a mental hospital,” the report quotes him as saying. “I called the nurse and everything, and they said they can’t get an ultrasound today. Today’s Friday.”

The woman called 911 again, one minute later. The results were the same. She said she was told no doctors were on duty at the hospital, and she should “just go lay down.” McMillian, she told the dispatcher, “laughed in her face and walked away.”

One nurse told investigators that another nurse who was dealing with the pregnant woman suggested “the resident had been complaining, but that she was one of the constant complainers.”

And another caregiver, Gloria Cladd, told the woman to stop calling 911. She replied “that she would continue to call 911 as long as she and her child were in danger,” the report said.

Cladd told investigators the woman “told her that she had been informing staff all day, not just the evening shift, that she was hurting and that her water had broke.”

“You do not need to go to [the clinic],” another nurse told her. “You need to go lay down, because you [won’t] have your baby until the middle of January.”

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