Instead of a prompt, sincere apology for the lapse of one nurse or more, the entire maternity hospital has its back against the wall.
The controversy in the Cebu Puericulture Center and Maternity House Inc. over a newborn baby’s taped mouth has placed Cebu and the reputation of Philippine nurses under the terrible glare of
international censure.
It looks overblown but that’s the nature of today’s instant photo-upload-feedback digital environment.
Why did the parents air their grievance on Facebook, laments the hospital lawyer Cornelio Mercado? Because the platform for citizens to raise matters of personal or public concern to a global online community is there. Deal with it.
A private-run nursery has become a viral source of distressing news with the baby-taping story closely followed by online and traditional media from the South China Morning Post and New York Daily News to the Huffington Post, and countless blogs.
One can’t overlook the fact that the father Ryan Noval and the baby’s mother Janice Badocdoc did go through channels to complain; the Facebook rants were a simultaneous exercise of asserting their rights as parents – and as dismayed clients who fully paid their hospital bill and expected professional service.
They were angry, but documented their complaint and raised it to the hospital’s information desk on the same evening of discovery of the newborn’s condition on May 9, then waited for top hospital officials to live up to a promise, given in a private meeting, to investigate and sanction the personnel involved.
The good that is expected out of this scandal is that positive change can happen. That lessons would be learned and institutions strengthened.
This won’t happen if the response is a strategy of stonewalling – denial and stalling to avoid further embarrassment.
It’s disturbing how the hospital, now speaking only though a lawyer on full defense mode, has stepped away from its early position of a caring, concerned medical facility to that of a suspicious administrator stretching the seams of logic.
The simple has become complicated.
The search for facts has slid lower to innuendos and a question of intentions.
Now the hospital is doubting the origin of the face tape and its culprit: “We state for the record that the nurses and midwife had nothing to do with this,” the lawyer wrote the Department of Health after one week.
“We are also informed that photos of other infants in the nursery were also recorded without permission.”
Should we now entertain the silly scenario of a mother sneaking into the nursery to tape the mouth of her own infant so she can take a baby selfie? Or of the hospital janitor or some unhinged visitor entering to do the same?
The initial fury over exaggerated reports about the “gagging” of a crying infant was tempered by later information from a duty nurse that the tape was there to hold in place a pacifier, a soother whose use is a big no-no for breastfeeding.
Now the hospital is acting more nervous about admitting the pacifier in the baby’s mouth than the adhesive tape on his lips and cheeks.
Here, perhaps, lies the center’s real fear – that it would lose its DOH certification as a “baby-mother-friendly” maternity facility because of a pacifier.
What the hospital should remember at this stage two weeks into the controversy is that inaction and stalling – when it could discipline the entire shift of nursing staff on duty on May 9 – is costlier than taking responsibilty.
In covering up for one or more misguided staffers, they risk losing something more precious than a regulatory requirement — goodwill and public trust.