Babies got mixed up in Finnish hospital in 1970

Recent case in Czech Republic appears to have a parallel

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A male reader contacted Helsingin Sanomat after last week’s article in the Finnish paper, in which a Turku-based chief surgeon claimed that babies have never been mixed up in a Finnish hospital. The chief surgeon was interviewed in connection with a case in which babies went to wrong parents in a hospital in the Czech Republic.
      The man contacted the editorial office to recount an incident from 1970, where - owing to a mix-up at the maternity ward - his baby was given to the wrong parents for almost a week.
      The "baby" is now a 37-year-old man unaware of the hotchpotch related to the first days of his life.
     
In the autumn of 1970 two baby boys were born at Helsinki’s Naistenklinikka hospital. At first everything took place normally and for the first feeding the two mothers were given their own babies.
      In between the first and the second feedings, however, the babies had been placed in the wrong cots. Nobody paid any attention to the discrepancy in the identification tags on the mothers and the babies, and the mistake went unnoticed.
      The father wondered about the scab on the baby’s head, which his child had not had before. Still, nobody suspected that the babies had been switched.
      "At that stage we thought it was too early to tell who the baby resembles. We must have been still confused because of the childbirth and all", the father explained.
      The mistake was only discovered when the families were about to leave the hospital. At that point the mother’s alarm bells started ringing.
     
"This is not my baby", the mother suddenly blurted out when she was handed a child to be taken home.
      The father caught the other family on the stairs on their way out of the hospital. This was not unnaturally the start of a merry-go-round par excellence.
     
The babies’ identities were finally verified with blood tests. The hospital director flew in all the way from Germany to sort out the cock-up.
      "It must have been some kind of maternal instinct coming out. We were completely dumbfounded. The mix-up was a terrible shock to us."
     
Today’s staff at Naistenklinikka have never heard of the case, not even as an urban legend or a warning example to new nurses. The identification systems at maternity hospitals have since been updated.


Links:
  Czech baby mix-up nurses sacked (BBC Online)

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