Dr Abdullah Al-Rabea, Minister of Health, has ordered the formation of a five-member committee to look into the deaths of two Saudi women who died after giving birth to two healthy babies at a government maternity and children hospital in Jeddah. The committee comprising leading officials from Makkah Health Directorate has barred foreign medical staff implicated in the cases from leaving the Kingdom while investigations are in progress. Preliminary investigations conducted with 16 doctors and nurses in the hospital showed that the deaths resulted from negligence when doctors in the ward mistakenly prescribed wrong medicines. One woman developed serious complications which caused her death while the other died of septic shock. Majed Al-Selami, husband of the first victim, aged 30, claimed that his wife was admitted last month to the hospital with labor pain. He said that doctors assured him of a normal delivery, but after a few minutes they came back and asked him to sign consent for the removal of her uterus because of severe bleeding. The second day he visited his wife. But the very next day the doctors told him that his wife had developed lungs hemorrhage, a matter that made them fix a drainage tube to drain out the toxic waste, he said. He said that one of the female doctors in the ward removed the tube after a telephonic approval from a consultant. But he said that his wife collapsed immediately after the removal of the drainage tube. Another bereaved husband, Majed Al-Ansari, said that he took his wife to the hospital in the mid of last month when she felt labor pain. He said that she was kept for two days in the ward in labor pain. Eventually the ward's doctor told him that his wife would only give birth by Cesarean section, he said. He said that after she came out from the operation room she was having high fever and abdominal edema. The doctor told him that she has to under go immediate surgery. He said that he tried to take his wife to a private hospital but the attending doctor assured him that she would improve. The third day he was told that his wife developed complications and died. __
