A New York woman has lost her job as a NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) nurse after a patient’s father captured footage of her slamming the baby’s face into a bassinet while changing his diaper, NBC New York reported.
A two-day-old infant, Nikko, was at Good Samaritan University Hospital in West Islip on Long Island being treated with antibiotics. Excited first time dad, Fidel Sinclair, began filming him through partially drawn curtains, and was horrified with what he saw. In the video taken by Sinclair’s phone, a NICU nurse is seen forcefully flipping the baby from onto his back to his stomach on the bassinet.
“I’m happy I was there,” Sinclair said in an interview. “God sent me. If it wasn’t for God. . . We would have never seen none of that happen. And that would have kept happening through the night- not only to him, but to the other babies too.”
Consuelo Saravia, Nikko’s mother, was horrified with what she saw. She spent many nights crying, and struggled to sleep knowing that her newborn could have been hurt in the care of people she was supposed to trust.
After being shown the video, Saravia confronted the nurse, yelling her that she was to stay away from Nikko. “I told her, ‘I don’t want you to touch my child! You just slammed him,’” she recalled. “She said, ‘Oh, no! If you think I mishandled him or anything, I’m sorry.’”
The two concerned parents, immediately spoke to administrators, showing them the camera footage. A spokesperson for the organization that operates the hospital says an investigation was immediately conducted, and that the nurse was both terminated from her position and reported to the Department of Health. “Keeping our patients safe remains our paramount concern,” they said in the statement.
