Claims critically ill boy ignored
A MOTHER says daycare centre staff failed to act when she found her son hyperventilating and with mottled skin before he slipped into a coma.
The NSW education department’s Early Childhood Education Directorate is investigating Heather Dufty’s claims that staff dismissed her three-year-old Jaxon as being “just cold” when she found him distressed at Kradle 2 Krayons childcare centre in Penrith.
Minutes later he collapsed into a potentially fatal diabetic coma known as ketoacidosis, before slipping in and out of consciousness for 24 hours.
Hospital emergency staff battled to stabilise him before he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
He spent four days in intensive care at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead.
The incident happened three days before a boy from a nearby primary school was reportedly struck by a car as it reversed out of the driveway at the same centre.
Employment consultant Mrs Dufty, 33, said she did not expect workers at the $90-a-day centre to diagnose her son but was con- cerned they did not raise the alarm when he was “clearly not behaving normally”.
“I’m not a demented mother looking for attention,” the mother-of-three said, adding: “There was clearly something wrong with my boy when I found him hyperventilating and a horrible shade of purplebrown.
“The girl looking after him said: ‘He’s just cold’ and when I asked how long he had been mottled, she asked: ‘What does that mean?’.”
A Kradle 2 Krayons spokesman dismissed the claims as “completely incorrect and false”.