Navy: 3 childbirth deaths recently at Guam hospital - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Navy: 3 childbirth deaths recently at Guam hospital

Two infants and a maternity patient died within a “relatively short time period” of one another at the naval hospital on Guam, a Navy official said Friday.

Guy Schein, a spokesman for the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, D.C., confirmed the three deaths, but could not characterize the circumstances surrounding them, other than saying that each was related to childbirth.

Schein said the three deaths occurred over a period of roughly 45 days. He could not be more specific.

A spokesman for the Guam hospital referred all questions on the deaths to Naval Medical Center San Diego. Sonja Hanson, a spokeswoman for that facility, was unable to answer specific questions Friday afternoon.

Schein described the cases as unrelated and said each would be investigated as a separate incident. That said, each “unfavorable outcome” at any Navy hospital is investigated as a matter of policy, he said.

“They are three different, unique teams,” he said of the medical personnel who handled the deliveries. “They weren’t associated.”

Schein said Navy officials have not normally published data on infant mortality rates at Navy hospitals because they are not required to do so by federal law, but he defended the quality of Navy medicine and said it compares favorably with that given by civilian hospitals.

“That’s unfortunately one of the situations you have in medicine,” Schein said. “Doctors and nurses are not God. Every outcome is not perfect. No matter how good [Navy medical staffs] are, some people don’t make it.”

Naval Hospital Guam admits approximately 2,000 patients and delivers about 300 babies in a typical year, according to information found on a Defense Department Web site. Nationwide, the rate of infant mortality — death of an infant in its first year — was 6.78 deaths per 1,000 infants in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.