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Anger and pain in Tivaouane. After the collective burial, on May 29, of eleven newborn babies who had tragically died a few days earlier in a fire in the public hospital of this city in western Senegal, the distress of the families did not dried up.
The Patients in Danger collective is organising, on Friday June 3, a citizen’s march between the town hall and the prefecture to “Call for the truth, a renewal of the public hospital and an audit of hospital infrastructure” from the country. Quite a symbol. “What happened is shocking and our anger is immense,” explains Nina Penda Faye, one of the collective’s spokespersons. Created in April, the group of volunteers has been joined by more than 300 people and organizations of weight such as the Association of Senegalese Jurists (AJS) or the Senegalese Council of Women (Cosef). And the testimonies are multiplying to denounce the unworthy reception conditions, “inhuman”in Senegalese hospitals and medical violence that goes beyond isolated news stories. “A very dark picture”according to the collective.
The fire which broke out on May 25 in the new neonatal unit of Tivaouane is indeed the fifth tragedy of this type to have shaken Senegal in a little over a year. On April 24, 2021, four infants had already burned to death and two others had been injured in Linguère hospital (center). On October 9, a baby girl died of burns and asphyxiation when she was placed on phototherapy for jaundice the day after her birth at the Madeleine clinic in Dakar.
1er April 2022, Astou Sokhna, nine months pregnant, died in Louga hospital (north) after twenty hours of agony and a denial of care when she requested a cesarean section. Her baby did not survive this ordeal. On May 8, it was little Diary, barely 10 days old, that the maternity staff of Kaolack hospital (center-west) deposited at the morgue “in a box” according to testimonies. The agents of the service, noting that the child was still alive, immediately warned pediatrics, who tried to save her, in vain.
Negligence and “abnormalities”
Each time, the absence of caregivers at their workstation, negligence, lack of communication between workers and dysfunctional equipment are the cause of these deaths. In Louga, three midwives were found guilty of ” no assistance to the person in danger “ and given a six-month suspended prison sentence on May 11. The investigation linked to the Linguère tragedy had revealed “failure of an air conditioning unit” which caught fire. As for the death of the baby with jaundice in Dakar, the elements of the investigation revealed by the newspaper Liberation Senegal indicated an error in handling the ultraviolet lamps, leading to excessive exposure and respiratory arrest in the newborn. A second opinion requested by the clinic is in progress.
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