The 40 year old mother, Indumali Ekanayake, from Heiyantuduwa giving evidence before Colombo Fort Magistrate Kanishka Wijeratne at the inquiry into the death of her 5-year-old daughter on Monday pleaded in Court not to let the money power to cover up the investigations into her daughter’s death, ‘Daily Mirror’ reported yesterday.
She said that similar tragedies could happen to other patients in the future, therefore, she was making such a request and the Magistrate observed that with the legal provisions vested in him, he would conduct a fair inquiry.
She said that her daughter was suffering from minor symptoms similar to fit when she brought her to Nawaloka Hospital in Colombo on January 31 and it was the first time that she had seen the child suffer from such abnormal behaviour
The witness said that the child was recommended three blood tests and an MRI scanning by the doctor who checked her daughter, Buddhika Kaushalya Ratnayake, and 30 minutes after her daughter was put into the MRI scanning machine, after being anesthetized, a sound was heard.
“There were only a doctor and a technician inside the MRI scan room when the incident happened. I heard the doctor shouting that the balloon had exploded and nobody was there to assist him. I pushed off a ward attendant towards the room because there was nobody inside the room to help the doctor. When my daughter was pulled out from the machine, I saw, she had turned blue and the belly had become swollen. Other doctors came there only after eight or ten minutes had lapsed,” the mother said.
“Then they admitted my child to the ICU and put on a vacuum machine when I told them her body was so cold. They were deceiving us for a period of four days. On the fourth day I saw ants entering her nose,” she said.
One of the doctors, she said, had told her that the death was not due to the fault of the hospital management and the mother complained to the court that the hospital management concealed the fact that her daughter had died inside the MRI scan machine declaring she died four days later.
Fixing further magisterial inquiry to February 18, the Magistrate, meanwhile, observed that on the next hearing date the officials of the hospital would be summoned to give evidence in connection with this incident.
Counsel Ravindranath Dabare and Rushanka Samaranayake appeared for the aggrieved party while counsel Arosha Koggalawellala and Akalanka Ukwatte appeared for Nawaloka Hospital.
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