Since earlier this month, a family from Sarasota has been living in hell, thrown into a nightmarish world, condemned to go through life with an irreplaceable missing piece of themselves. April 8 was the day it all started, the day they received the news that every parent fears. Their most precious and vulnerable child, aged only 3 months, died while in the care of licensed staff at a DCF-licensed child care facility.
Leesfield & Partners has a long history of fighting for the most vulnerable among us. Children, especially infants and toddlers, are often neglected and abused. Day care institutions, schools and other youth organizations are too often fertile grounds for neglect and abuse. These failures result in babies losing their life, in toddlers being crushed to death, in small children breaking bones, rendered blind, amputated, sexually assaulted or molested. Protecting the vulnerable is paramount.
Most recently, Thomas Scolaro represented a family who lost their young daughter in a terrible failure to resuscitate event – the claims resulted in a 7-figure settlement. While parents were at work, baby was entrusted with a nurse and a therapist. Both providers were present when the girl’s tracheostomy tube became dislodged and ultimately disconnected. Baby was quickly thrown into distress and the providers sprung into action by using an ambu bag and performing CPR on the 15-months-old girl. Our investigation quickly established however that, during the entire resuscitation process, until fire rescue arrived, both baby’s providers had placed the ambu bag on her mouth and not the trach. As a result, baby could not, did not get any oxygen for almost 10 minutes, and she ultimately passed away.
This absolutely horrific case serves as two reminders: (1) How to properly resuscitate a person who has a tracheostomy tube to help them breathe; and (2) negligent acts that victimize children do occur at any and all levels of care. View Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center’s video to learn how to properly perform CPR on a child (ages 1 to 12) who has a trach tube.