Keeping Your Baby Yours

Hospital officials would do well to study the mix-up at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange, where two newborns were switched accidentally and one was sent home with a woman who was not his mother.

At St. Joseph, as at many hospitals, newborns and their mothers are given wristbands with the baby’s name and an individual identification number. Hospital employees are supposed to double-check the number when an infant is given to a nursing mother or placed back in a bassinet, which also has an identification tag.

A St. Joseph official said the baby that went home with Iliana Bravo and Brian Lambert last Sunday might have been put in the wrong bassinet before being given to the couple. Neither the parents nor nurses noticed that the name on the baby didn’t match the name on the bassinet or on Bravo’s tag.

Hospital officials said they now will require two nurses and the mother to compare names before checkout. They have also delivered a copy of hospital procedures to all hospital nursing units. Those are welcome steps, as are the reviews of policies and procedures that the incident has prompted at other hospitals.

New mothers, and fathers, are seldom in a calm state when it comes time to leave the hospital. It’s easy to overlook even important matters in the blizzard of paperwork and packing up.

Fortunately for Bravo and Lambert, and the parents of the other baby, the mix-up was caught the same day it occurred. Hospitals say such switches are extremely rare. That’s reassuring. But improved procedures and reviews clearly are required.