What Should You Do If You Suspect Brain Injury During Labor?
“What should you do if you suspect brain injury during labor?” we’ll answer this common birth injury-related question for you in our video below.
Learn More:
What is Birth-Related Injury? – Birth-Related Medical Malpractice
How Do You Know If You Have A Case For Medical Malpractice?
What is Birth Injury? – Birth Injury Overview
Video Transcript
Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:18 What Should You Do If You Suspect Brain Injury During Labor?
1:16 Talking With Your Provider
1:42 Request Your Medical Records
0:18 What Should You Do If You Suspect Brain Injury During Labor?
What do you do if your baby was just born and there seemed to be some problem with the baby, some issue neurologically, physically something that must have happened during the course of labor, and now what do you do as a parent?
Well, the first thing you can try to do is talk to the physician taking care of your baby, and try to get an understanding in lay terms as to what’s going on. Does the baby have an injury to the brain? Did the baby have any hypoxi injury or decreased oxygen to the brain during labor or during the delivery? Was there any trauma the baby sustained at the time of delivery? How was the baby doing right at that moment? What scanning, ultrasound, or imaging study are they planning to do to evaluate the potential injury to the baby? How’s the baby’s current oxygen levels doing right now?
1:16 Talking With Your Provider
Another issue to talk to the provider about is whether or not cooling of the baby’s head needs to be done because colling of that baby’s head sometimes can help decrease the effect of a brain injury.
1:42 Request Your Medical Records
Your concern first needs to be about getting good care for your baby and trying to limit whatever damage occurred during the child birthing process. Once you kind of get that figured out, then you need to request the medical records and you should have them reviewed fairly promptly by someone knowledgeable so that they can tell you whether or not there was some issue with the care that was rendered.
That’s important because medical records over time, sometimes get more difficult to interpret. It’s always better to look at something pretty soon after it’s happened. People’s memories are better, you can get better information, and not everything that happens in the birthing event is necessarily recorded in the medical records. But especially today with electronic medical records, sometimes things are not put into records, and they should be.
It’s important if you think there’s actually been an injury to your baby that once you feel like you’ve assessed the injury, talked to the providers, and the baby’s getting the care it needs to minimize the damage, it’s important to get the records and get them looked at and find out whether or not there’s an issue with care.
If we can be of any help in that regard, please feel free to click on the link below, and we’ll be glad to help you in assessing your case.