Aggrieved families report hospital
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.