Sunday, May 28, 2017
Dubai: A gadget that aims to prevent babies from being moved without authorisation has been introduced at two Dubai Hospitals.
The device, which is about the size of a large eraser, straps around the baby’s leg, alerting the mother and hospital if someone attempts to move the baby without permission.
Launched on Sunday by the Dubai Health Authority (DHA), the emirate’s health regulator, the device will be rolled out in Dubai Hospital and Latifa Hospital. Both hospitals are managed by the regulator.
The DHA also announced the launch of a second device that monitors oxygen levels in an infant’s blood. If levels fall below the normal rate, the gadget will alert the mother and hospital staff.
It is perhaps every mother’s nightmare that their newborn baby gets switched with another — either on purpose or by accident — and they never get to find out.
However, while baby-switching is a fairly common theme in Hollywood movies, in real life, it’s extremely rare.
To prevent mix-ups involving new-borns, some hospitals take palm prints, fingerprints and foot prints. Nurses also double-check with the mother and confirm her identity.
But mix-ups do happen from time to time and, when they do, they grab plenty of attention. In one hospital blunder made in Japan in the 1950s, a baby boy was mistaken by hospital staff for another baby boy born just 13 minutes later.
The life-changing mistake was only discovered six decades later in 2013, when a 60-year-old truck driver found that he had been born to a rich family. Instead, fate had assigned him to be brought up by a single mother on welfare in a tiny apartment.
Meanwhile, the boy who was raised by a rich family had become the president of a property firm.
Although the truck driver told Japanese press that he wished he could have “turned the clock back”, he reportedly felt no resentment about his fate.
Staff Report
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