A baby Thai girl has been safely reunited with her biological parents after being mistakenly swapped with a baby from Myanmar for a month due to hospital staff negligence at Krathumban Hospital in Samut Sakhon province.
This mix-up was resolved thanks to the father's curiosity and habit of taking pictures.
The father, who identified himself only as “Anucha” disclosed the mix-up on Facebook today. In his post, he wrote that his baby was born on August 11, but was separated from her mother for treatment, after she developed an unusually fast pulse.
The hospital said that she had to be given anti-biotics for seven days before her parents could visit her.
The couple had gone to the hospital every day, from 6.30pm to 8pm since August 12, to see their baby from outside the ward and the father secretly took pictures of the baby with his smartphone.
On August 17, the couple were allowed to hold the baby for the first time, but the father found the baby’s hair was shorter than it was before and her eyebrows were gone.
The name tags on both hands were also missing and the blanket did not belong to her.
Curious, he questioned a nurse about the name tags, but was told that they might have come off when she was taken for a bath and the blanket in the box might have been mistakenly taken away.
The father wrote that, at first, he thought about checking every baby in the ward, but dropped this idea because he might disturb them.
On August 18, after the week of treatment, he was allowed to take the baby home. He wrote that every time he looked at the baby he had the feeling that she was not his.
The next morning, he called the hospital and told the staff about his concern and asked them whether it could guarantee that that the baby he brought home was his own.
The hospital staff told him that his baby was different from the other babies in the ward because she was given medication for seven days and her hands bore bruises from the injections.
He also asked why his baby’s hair was short and had no eyebrows, but the hospital staff claimed that a baby’s face changes almost every day.
He then decided to post his problem and pictures of the baby taken on different days online, asking whether it was the same baby.
Several netizens suggested that they take blood tests to confirm a match.
The tests showed the baby has group B blood, his blood is AB and his wife is group A. The father said he was angry and felt sorry for his baby over the mix-up and demanded that the hospital track down his biological daughter.
The baby was finally found on August 21. The two families had blood tests, which showed that the Myanmar family members have group B blood, which matched the baby in his care.
The man complained that, due to the mix-up, his child had been over-administered anti-biotics and he wonders whether this will have any negative long-term impact.
DNA tests, released on September 15, confirmed the baby mix-up and the hospital agreed to take responsibility by granting the man’s baby a “privilege”.
“The privilege is that she does not have to queue up like other patients,” he wrote.
The man further wrote that he had demanded 200,000 baht in compensation from the hospital, to be split equally between the two families, but the hospital told him to wait two weeks for the payment.
At the end of his long message, the man said that his baby might have gone to Myanmar if he had not collected evidence to prove that the mix-up had occurred.
