NH Guam malpractice case

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Having been in the delivery room more times than I can count, it truthfully sounds like everything went like he was trained to do. Meconium aspirators suck and it’s not the first thing you jump to unless you see thick meconium in the baby’s mouth. Meconium aspirators arent even part of the NRP algorithms or on the online test scenarios, and they are terrible. Having the baby properly intubated and anesthesia helping suction by 11 minutes of life in the middle of the night is actually impressive to me.

Trashing this pediatricians name with this article doesn’t do anyone any favors. Navy pediatricians get triple the nursery/nicu exposure than civilian programs. They have all the right training. If this happened at a local civilian hospital in the states (where pediatricians aren’t always in house overnight), I bet it would have taken a lot longer than 11 minutes to get this baby ventilated.
 
This turned out horribly for everyone involved. I don’t even know enough about it to weigh in, except to agree that I don’t see anything that warrants dragging this particular guy’s name through the mud.
 
What a disaster. In an emergency, just use the dirty suction connector, though he probably didn’t know it fell back there.
It’s a shame it took that long to intubate the baby and suction them. Seems like a straightforward meconium aspiration from the description. But if he came out blue and floppy, that’s an OB problem as the plugged lungs are not in use yet. Seems like the peds guy was thrown under the bus for an, at least partial OB and partial systems issue. I drop stuff all the time and there are replacements for most critical things within arms reach. There’s also a tech, nurse, etc. who can run and get something. As always, there has to be much more to the story. Perhaps there wasn’t any other meconium aspirators in the room or even on the floor? Why not just try regular suction tubing, though they might not have had it in a small enough size. Why not adapt the suction tubing to the ETT and seal it with your fingers with the connector off? Etc.
That’s a good other take home point. Maybe it was a Navy/austere environment necessity, but think outside the box in an emergency and use what you have and try to make it work.
 
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