Sending the wrong message

II'S HARD to understand why it took the North West Regional Health Authority (NWRHA) two weeks to address the deaths of seven babies in its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

The NICU provides supportive care for early births or preterm infants, and others in a fragile neonatal state.

It wasn’t until two weeks after the news broke and pre-action protocol letters were sent that the NWRHA issued a press release to share some “indisputable facts.”

Among the corrections of misinformation was the assertion that TT’s neonatal mortality was among the lowest in the Caribbean region – a fact that may certainly change after the recent deaths.

Eleven children at the NICU have been said to have died of bacterial infection between February and April.

By the authority’s account, seven infants died of infection between April 4 and 9. It has established the presence of at least three bacterial organisms in the unit that are known threats to at-risk infant children. The NICU has since undergone deep sanitising.

By April 18, the authority had sent Dr Darrel Jones, head of the Port of Spain General Hospital’s (PoSGH) Infection Prevention Control Unit, on administrative leave.

A newspaper advertisement on April 22 offered further defensive statements, noting that the neonatal unit at the PoSGH receives the smallest and weakest infants born in Trinidad from other RHAs, admitting 33 such babies each month.

But at every point when the best possible information available to the NWRHA was available even from before the news broke, the authority fudged the facts.

The very first release, issued when the unit must have been aware how many infant deaths were attributable to infection, offered no numbers, referring instead to “several” deaths, and thus opening the door to speculation – about which it later complained – about an unknown number of others which may in fact have had completely different – and unavoidable – causes.

Instead of compassion and engagement, the authority went hard on the defensive, missing the opportunity to take a humane approach to those grieving these most distressing of deaths.

It’s clear that the NICU generally does good work, giving premature babies at higher risk of infection and infants with birth defects a fighting chance at life.

The unit may not have needed to make public its very real successes over the years, but issuing factoids to contextualise a terrible story proved demonstrably ineffective.

It needed to build trust with frank and open disclosures of the deaths, offering clarity and context that would have helped the wider public and more significantly, the grieving parents, to understand what happened.

Instead of encouraging acceptance and trust in this critical arm of the public health sector, the authority has instead seeded suspicion and dismay in its mishandling of this incident.