Aggrieved families report hospital
Evi Mariani, Jakarta
Police reports were filed against two hospitals in Central Jakarta on Wednesday.
Cipto Mangunkusumo General Hospital (RSCM) in Central Jakarta was reported by Mantep Mulyono following the death of his eight- month-old daughter, Wulan Yulianti, after she underwent surgery to remove a tumor.
YPK Maternity Hospital on Jl. Gereja Theresia, Central Jakarta, was reported by Doddy Sudrajat, who said the hospital withheld his wife's medical records from him. Doddy's wife, Lucy Maywati, died in April 2003, three days after delivering her second baby by cesarean section.
Mantep, a construction worker, said at the city police headquarters that the doctors had told him to "accept fate".
"But one of the doctors told me that the surgeons did not stitch up my daughter's stomach properly. The doctors were supposed to remove a tumor from Wulan's stomach. After they made the incision, they realized the operation would be too risky," he said.
Wulan underwent surgery on April 19. She died six days later. She was buried in Mantep's hometown of Cirebon, West Java.
Mantep named the hospital and surgeon Amir Toyib in his complaint to the police.
Police said they could charge the doctor under Article 359 and Article 361 of the Criminal Code. Article 359 stipulates anyone causing a death due to negligence could face a maximum five-year prison term, while Article 361 states if a crime is committed while the accused is on duty, a maximum one-third of the punishment can be added to the sentence.
Hendry Sihombing, a Legal Aid Institute for Health (LBH Kesehatan) lawyer representing Mantep, said that RSCM had offered to do an autopsy on Wulan but the family had rejected the offer.
"We realized that an autopsy would have been important to the investigation, but we rejected the offer as we thought the RSCM could give a biased result. We would have agreed to an autopsy if it was supervised by, for example, the police or independent institutions," he said.
Hendry is also representing Doddy, who he accompanied to file the police report.
According to the lawyer, doctors at the hospital told Doddy that his baby was healthy but that the mother was hemorrhaging after the cesarean.
Dissatisfied with the explanation, Doddy asked to see Lucy's medical records, which the hospital refused, saying they were confidential. Instead, they gave him a brief of her records.
A year after his wife's death, Doddy decided to report the hospital to the police for withholding his wife's medical records.