An Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) report shows that nearly 70% of medical diagnostic errors occurs during the testing process. That’s when staff are ordering, collecting, processing, or obtaining results, and about 20% of testing errors were because of mixed-up samples, mislabeled specimens, or tests performed on the wrong patient. And that’s exactly what one Georgia family says happened when one patient, only five years old, visited an urgent care and her lab results left them reeling.
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A College Park mother, per local news station Fox 5 Atlanta, took her five-year-old daughter to urgent care because she hadn’t been feeling well in April. After the staff collected a urine sample from the toddler, the facility called the mother to tell her the shocking results that her daughter tested positive for three sexually transmitted diseases, including “trichomoniasis, gonorrhea, chlamydia.”
The terrifying test results landed in the hands of both the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) and police… who showed up at the mother’s door.
“I couldn’t even breathe when they came to my house,” the mother, whose name has not been publicly revealed, said. “I was really thinking like they’re about to take my child away from me. I knew I was the best mom and nothing happened to her.” Under Georgia state law, urgent care staff must report results to Family and Children Services.
The toddler was re-tested at the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the same urgent care facility, where the previous STD results came back negative. Despite the vindication, the mother said she felt “violated,” per The Independent.
“My daughter is five and you don’t want to put those kinds of things on a five-year-old,” the mother said. “She’s still wondering, ‘Why did that happen to her? Why did the doctor and the police come? Why was she looked at down there?’ “
Stephen Fowler, an attorney who represents the family, told Fox 5 that although the case is still under investigation, the family is considering getting legal justice. “We’re still looking for results and answers and responses,” Fowler said. “But what we’ve seen so far, there is evidence of some serious concerns of the handling of this child’s healthcare.”
An attorney for the urgent care said they use a third-party lab for testing and had simply reported the results they were given.
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