A local mother is accusing the Stollery Children’s Hospital of negligence after her young daughter’s hand was allegedly damaged by intravenous therapy.
Emmy Gunther, 3, was supposed to leave the hospital on Monday after recovering from open-heart surgery, but the girl is now dealing with another major health complication.
Jalena Gunther left her daughter with her grandmother to get some rest Friday night because her son is in the intensive care unit.
“My mom texted me half an hour later saying something is not right,” Gunther told CTV News.
Emmy, who has Down syndrome and is non-verbal, managed to ask for help, but her mother says staff did not aid her.
“The nurses would come in, and kind of, you know, look at her, and then walk back out,” she said. “Nothing was really ever done. In the middle of the night again, my mom said, like, ‘Where is the doctor? He hasn’t come. She’s still in pain. What’s going on?’”
The next morning, Gunther says a nurse realized the IV had slipped out of her daughter’s vein and into the skin, burning it and leaving her arm swollen and hand covered in blisters.
“The nurses and doctors all said this was a major IV burn that had had to have been running into her skin for hours and hours,” Gunther said.
The mother wants the Stollery to apologize and “admit they did something wrong.”
“I want to see disciplinary action taken against the nurses that worked that night that didn’t follow protocol to check the IV every hour,” she said. “Their actions were negligent, their protocol, as I’ve been told, is they’re supposed to check IV sites every hour. It wasn’t checked all night.”
Alberta Health Services released a statement to CTV News, saying in part:
“We are involved with this family and reviewing the care that has been provided. AHS has started a quality review of the care. We are very sorry about the complication that this little girl has experienced. Our standards of care should not result in this type of complication for any of our patients.”
The three-year-old will need up to four surgeries and it is unclear if she will regain full function of her hand.
“I’m just heartbroken. We should be going home tomorrow from her heart surgery,” Gunther said. “It hurts everything inside of me that this was avoidable, and now my daughter is going to go through weeks of intense pain.”
With files from Angela Jung
