It will be the word of the couple Edalene and Roldan Añosa against the staff of the Vicente Sotto Memorial Medical Center (VSMMC) who, despite her doctor’s advice, insisted on a normal delivery for their baby son instead of a caesarian section.
In their complaint, the couple said they were made to sign a waiver by the staff before undergoing the delivery which would absolve them of any responsibility should anything go wrong.
Why the staff proceeded with the normal delivery of the couple’s son instead of a caesarian section, only they can answer to the police and to the Department of Health (DOH) which is supposed to investigate the incident.
Was there something they saw that convinced them that they were right and Edalene’s attending doctor was wrong and that they should ignore his diagnosis and recommendation?
Were there no doctors capable of performing the caesarian section and if so, can they be exempted from sanctions?
The DOH should ferret out the answers to these questions and decide if sanctions are forthcoming.
We hope that the police and the DOH can finish as soon as possible their investigation into the couple’s complaint to verify if indeed the attending staff should be held accountable for their mistake, which ended with them losing the couple’s son.
What was painful and insulting to the couple was that they were made to sign a waiver which could be used by the hospital to extricate themselves and their staff from any sanction that they might face for failing to ensure the safe delivery of the couple’s newborn.
The DOH should determine if there was any undue pressure exerted by the medical staff to convince the couple to sign the waiver and proceed with a normal delivery despite the attending doctor’s advice that was based on an ultrasound showing she had a breech baby, which meant the infant would come out feet rather than head first.
Waivers should be signed only after those involved were made fully aware of the implications of any surgical procedure that they agreed to undergo and if there was evidence that all available options had been exhausted.
From all indications, the staff wasn’t entirely forthcoming when they presented the waiver for the couple to sign since they did this for insurance in the event they botched the operation, which they eventually did. They would never appreciate the fact that Edalene lost three children prior to losing her newborn at their hands.
It’s not the first time that the VSMMC has been implicated in a controversy—Google “Black Suede scandal” and “baby kidnapping” —and this latest incident is yet another black eye to the decades-old medical institution.
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