Concerted effort to check theft of newborn from govt hospitals

The women after stealing the infants have managed to sneak through, though the mother or attendant was close by. In fact they had whisked away the newborns under the nose of the hospital security. Now, both these government hospitals are working on a combined effort involving mothers and attendants of babies, hospital staff, digital surveillance and support of the police to prevent such incidents. Coimbatore Medical College Hospital (CMCH) dean A. Edwin Joe said they learnt a lot from the incident and are working on safety measures to avert them. An average of 35 babies are born in CMCH every day. Apart from Coimbatore, women from Palakkad, Nilgiris, Tirupur and Erode come to CMCH as it is the closest government tertiary care health facility. The hospital has 11 CCTV cameras around the maternity ward to prevent baby thefts. 

“We have identified 10 more places to install CCTV cameras. Two of these cameras will be inside the maternity ward to monitor movement of strangers. The footage will be screened by women nurses round the clock. Hospital staff have also started sensitising new patients about the precautionary measures regarding safekeeping of babies,” he added. Breaking the conventional hospital procedure, they have asked the hospital staff and security guards to first alert the police to report such situations of emergency to save time in recovering the stolen baby. “Usually the head of the department is alerted and he in turn alerts the head of the institution and then the police. This conventional procedural delay would consume precious time taken to recover the baby,” a hospital authority said. 

A senior health department official said that the government is contemplating on replicating a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) project that is being experimented at the Government Rajaji Hospital in Madurai. The system was introduced as a pilot project in January 2016 for using technology to put an end to baby thefts. “The baby is tagged with the mother and their attendant. When someone else takes the baby away from them beyond a certain point an alarm will be raised, similar to the system in leading supermarkets. The project is implemented by Anna University and is under trial,” the official said. If it is successful it will be implemented in CMCH and other tertiary care hospitals across the State.