Hospital’s failure to return parents’ call ‘wholly inadequate’: coroner
The family phoned Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital seeking urgent medical assistance after their toddler’s procedure, but no-one responded.
A hospital’s failure to call back the parents of a toddler who were concerned about her condition after being discharged home following an oesophagoscopy was “wholly inadequate”, a Victorian coroner has said.
Two-year-old Callie died in January 2018, the day after being discharged from the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.
She had undergone a rigid oesophagoscopy dilation — the fourth in a series of surgeries planned to manage the caustic injuries she had sustained after accidentally ingesting caustic dishwashing liquid.
She was discharged the same day and returned to her home four hours away in Corowa, rural NSW.
