Chiamaka’s newborn baby was denied oxygen and abandoned carelessly in a sink by clinic staff after a failed caesarean section claimed her life at Felak Alpha Convalescent Clinic, Oshodi.
Honourable Agunwa (not real name), who identified himself as the deceased’s cousin, told FIJ that the family received a call informing them that Chiamaka would undergo a caesarean section, at midnight on Tuesday.
After they got the message, Agunwa’s father, sister and mother left the house around 4 am to see Chiamaka at the hospital. Agunwa stayed back to prepare for work.
On getting there, the family found that Chiamaka had lost her life.
Agunwa went to the hospital just before 7 am, and asked about the well-being of the baby. His sister told him that she had repeatedly asked the clinic staff about the baby since they arrived, but they had given her no concrete answers.
She then led Agunwa to where they had dropped the baby.
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“She took me to somewhere that looked like a bathroom… I don’t even know what to call it. The child was left in the sink, on a tray. No clothes, the placenta had not been cut, nothing,” Agunwa told FIJ.
FIJ saw a video of the baby in the sink (embedded here).
Agunwa told FIJ that he was taken aback by the situation and he immediately went to inquire from the doctor about the state of the baby.
The doctor said that the baby had a low chance of survival, and that they had it on oxygen for a while at midnight but removed it after he felt that the child would not survive. Agunwa said the doctor told him that the baby had a 90/10 probability of dying.
“When my sister took me to go and see the child, the child was still gasping for breath. In the video I took at 8 am, the child was still gasping for breath, and it still was when my sister carried it to another hospital,” Agunwa told FIJ.
“If a child is still gasping for air from midnight when the oxygen mask was taken off, eight hours into the morning, then that child does not have a 90/10 chance of survival. I don’t believe that.”
Agunwa and his sister were agitated against the clinic staff and they insisted that it was not a 90/10 survival situation. The siblings said that if there was nothing the doctor could do anymore, he should write a referral so that the baby could be moved to another hospital.
“We didn’t want to lose two lives on the same day. We don’t even know the conditions under which the C-section was performed in that hospital. The hospital is not a place I would come to treat malaria, not to talk of a caesarean surgery,” Agunwa said.
“The condition of the place is very messed up,” he added.
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Agunwa also told FIJ that while the tension was building up, he had asked the father of the child whether he was aware of the state that his baby was in and the father said that the doctor had told him both the baby and mother did not survive.
The doctor wrote a referral, and Agunwa’s sister, the brother and the baby’s father took the baby to a hospital in Ikeja. There, they were informed that the doctors were on strike. Upon getting to another hospital, those doctors were also on strike.
Finally, they were accepted at a private hospital.
The baby was still gasping for air the whole time.
At the private hospital, the doctor who admitted the baby complained about the baby being left in that state for so long while they tried to revive the child.
Unfortunately, the baby lost its life, and the family took the body back to Felak Alpha, where the ambulance with the mother’s dead body was waiting.
The two bodies were taken to the hometown of the parents to be buried.
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Agunwa told FIJ that when he got home, he called the Health Facilities Monitoring and Accreditation Agency (HEFAMAA) and narrated the incident.
They responded, and asked him to send a petition against the hospital to an official email address that they would send shortly. However, HEFAMAA did not send this email account, and did not respond to the calls from Agunwa any further.
Felak Alpha Convalescent Clinic was shut down by HEFAMAA on April 7, 2022, for operating beyond its abilities after operating on Mrs Fatimah, who died under the knife.
Dr Abiola Idowu, the executive secretary of the agency, stated that Convalescent and Nursing homes were not permitted by the state to perform surgeries.
HEFAMAA also found that the facility had no qualified personnel.
Felak Alpha was re-opened in 2023 and registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) in December of 2023. It currently has a HEFAMAA approved signboard in front of the establishment.
When FIJ called HEFAMAA on Friday, they responded and requested an emailed petition.
Attempts to reach Felak Alpha Clinic proved abortive as the clinic had no online profiles, no phone numbers on directories and no contact lines on their Google Map profile.
While attempting to track the health clinic down, FIJ also realised that the clinic made a name change after the 2022 shutdown, from Felobam Alpha Clinic to Felak Alpha.
The post Pregnant Woman Died During C-Section. Felak Alpha Clinic Left Her Newborn Barely Breathing in Sink for 8 Hours appeared first on Foundation For Investigative Journalism.