My belief is simple. When something goes wrong, doctors should afford respect to the victims by explaining what happened and answering questions.
It’s disingenuous to dismiss genuine questions as disrespectful just because they don’t want to answer them.
Without questions, doctors don’t have the right to slander someone with whom they disagree.
The death of an eight-day-old child has a tremendous ripple effect on people’s lives. Doctors can address what happened respectfully — and they should feel a responsibility to do so. Not because there is some law that mandates them to do so. But because it is the responsible approach to take.
Maybe instead of bringing in the risk management team and legal counsel, they could have a conversation.
I completely recognize it’s a topic they may not want to address. How do the parents feel? I doubt this is a topic most parents ever envision facing. When they met by doctors who obfuscate the facts, it’s impossible to process.
When a doctor says they did nothing wrong before any questions or asked, it’s hard to take anything they say at face value. When the chief medical officer of a hospital hangs up on a parent — twice — it makes it seem like he has something to hide.
As they say in the spin industry, it’s bad optics.
The doctors at the hospital say they launched an investigation. Yet, they did so shrouded in mystery. And allegedly launched an inquiry without the common decency of alerting the parents of the infant who died.
Still, they did not even speak to everyone present when my son died.
Had they asked us about the repeated questions from the hospital’s marketing team to film inside the NICU. They would have learned I observed nurses enter without washing hands and bringing in outside food and drink.
They never once asked me for my perspective. Instead, they dismissed everything I said as soon as I said it.
Well, almost everything. Reluctantly, the doctors agreed to reevaluate some of the protocols within their NICU.
I said it then, and I believe more so today. The hospital — and the doctors who run it — do not care about my son’s death. They certainly do not care about his parents.
