Another fatal incident at nursery

Of course that’s true although they may have more of a chance with an epi pen.

You can have a primary caregiver who loves you and still go to nursery. Or does love equate to never putting your child in nursery?

People have competing priorities like wanting to be the person looking after their own child until they start school/until they are three, whatever, and having to house and feed their child. You know this. Most people are not in the privileged financial position to not have to earn money.

The range of significant events that nursery owners have to tell Ofsted about could be anything from a serious accident involving a child to a change in the health of the manager or a complaint being made about a member of staff or a power cut or flood making the building unusable or someone vandalising the building. So that isn't going to be 75 injured or killed children! www.gov.uk/guidance/childcare-significant-events-to-notify-ofsted-about

The child might have had an epi pen but you can still die from a very severe anaphylactic reaction even when adrenaline has been administered.

This was a long time ago now, but dc started nursery at 3 and I gave the key worker a health lowdown and dc's inhaler and a couple of months later (after a number of problems) when we were leaving to go to another nursery (which was equally bad, but the one after that was good...) the key worker couldn't find the inhaler, they came back with several inhalers which were not ours and I had to go into where they keep inhalers to root around and eventually find it. Inhalers can save lives, I was really hacked off that they didn't remember what the various parents who had sent in inhalers had told them about this.

This story is incredibly sad, how awful for the family.

Such an awful incident, allergies are so terrifying.
Honestly as a childminder I feel like I just won't risk having children with allergies anymore, I just don't think I can 100% I will never make a mistake especially with something like dairy that I have in the house and the other children eat at every meal and snack.

I don't believe nurseries are generally dangerous though. I seem to remember reading research in the past that said grandparent care was the most risky, followed by nurseries then professional home care (nannies/childminders) tended to be safest though possibly nurseries were.
I'd imagine home with parents is statistically least safe even - family homes don't have to meet the same safety standards as nurseries and childminders, and parents are busy with multiple children, doing housework, working, there are often poorly supervised dogs etc.

The use of statistics on MN is usually appalling, a situation where the figures that best match a prejudice are used.

Every time the Government, of whatever party, increases the free money for nursery care the fees increase and that doesn't always equate with improved ratios etc..

I agree. The children at our school all had epi pens which were with them at all snack and break times and of course lunchtime

Scaremongering statistically illiterate post from the OP

This is such a sad story, which goes without saying. This thread is very unnecessary however and cruel towards the parents of the child who I’m sure would have had their child with them if they could have.

As if working women don’t have enough to feel guilty about, now the OP I started this thread attacking working Parents who rely on nurseries and trying to make them feel fear and guilt. To say nurseries are ‘unsafe’ and multiple children are dying? Shame on you.

Staff ratios in schools and nurseries are shocking. I work as residential staff in a boarding school . I have often been left alone with 50 teenagers. Some of them have allergies. Im so worried that one of them is going to be sick and i wont get to them in time as i am with anothed student.

These are places that should vitally have enough staff.

Ive looked online and there isnt even an official government staff ratio guideline for stsff working with 15 -17 year olds.

So schools can technically put one staff member supervising seventy 16 year olds and get away with it!

Is it better to say nursery is fine because some people have to use them out of necessity, even if you think it’s not fine? Is it ‘privileged’ to say that you don’t agree with child labour or prostitution?

To me it seems pretty clear that for children with chaotic or very poor or unwell parents, being in nursery is better than being at home. For most other very small children (under 2 or 3) it’s preferable to have one primary caregiver who loves you.

I’m sorry but someone was responsible.

I worked in a school kitchen before I retired and we knew every child with an allergy whether it was dairy, nuts or gluten intolerant and we had different areas for food prep also a list of names of who had what allergies.

It was a small school with just over 100 children attending but obviously much bigger than a nursery.

With the nut allergies ALL children were banned from bringing anything that contained nuts such as Nutella or pastries containing nuts and obviously bags of nuts too.

Someone was neglectful at that nursery.
Either the person who gave the yogurt to the baby without reading the instructions or the person who failed to point it out.

Surely there was a list of who had what allergies on the wall in the kitchen or door of the fridge.

I also worked in a care home at one time where some of the residents had to have a thickening agent in their drinks as they could have choked to death without it.
Their names were on a list in the kitchen which had to be checked EVERY day/night as it was subject to change.

This amounts to negligence.

I wonder if the people saying nobody should be blamed as they were busy, under staffed and were low paid workers would say the same if it had been their baby who had died???

I think not.

SOMEONE is guilty!

why didn't the child/nursery have a EpiPen for the child?

Did you not think your comment through for even a second??

OP, I voted YABU because of your apparent privileged bias against nursery and scaremongering comments about the number/frequency of stories about child deaths at nurseries. I don’t really appreciate you using this absolute horrific account as a reason why people shouldn’t use this form of childcare. If you want to focus your post on improving safety at nurseries well that would be of more value.

It doesn't happen. Staff get called out to do something else. I have seen staff working alone with three year olds.

The goverment doesnt give a shit about nurseries

CM Ratios are 1:3 for under fives.

Being busy shouldn't be an excuse. It should be pretty basic to know which children have allergies.
If it had been a case of children swapping food or cross contamination it would have been devastating but some level of excuse.

But children aren't dying in nursery "every other week". The linked case was months ago.

Cars probably kill more children per week than nurseries do in a year.

We chose our nursery in part because they had self-reported and incident that they would have been entirely able to cover up. They were able to demonstrate lots of processes they had to keep children safe, and it's a purpose built nursery with really good, safety-first layouts that make things really easy for staff.

It's about £30/day cheaper than the nursery all my antenatal friends go to. The nursery in an old building with tunnel corridors, without its own garden for each age group. The nursery where my friend's allergy daughter has had dairy repeatedly (my son is intolerant and hasn't had any at his cheaper nursery). The nursery where they did a rapid transition up to the next room, whilst my son has been eased into his transition. The nursery where they freely share images of other children without checking with the other parents - ours is strictly limited.

Our nursery is currently Requires Improvement, on what are, as someone with sector experience, totally bullshit grounds. The expensive nursery has a lot of bells and whistles (a coffee bar for parents!), but they don't have a solid, grounded approach to child safety like ours does.

I am in favour of nurseries for most children, but knowing what makes a good one is a huge difference to the instinctive "feel" parents will mostly go by.

Being poorly paid - we are not saying its giving the worker an excuse.

We are saying that the government should value creche workers more, pay them better and then the profession woukd attract bettee workers.

Currently creche and nursery jobs are seen as low skiled low paid workers. Anyone can do them with one certificate. So it attracts people that are not able to look after children well

Having worked with kids (GirlGuides, Scouts, childmining) I am bemused that when you have a life threatening allergy that there weren’t safety measures - eg. He was given an allergy armband to wear all day or, before meals, a register is checked and a hi viz bib popped on to highlight that this kid’s foods need to be checked and even double checked by the supervisor. I fear that there may have been some dismissiveness over the severity of the allergy (lots of us are dairy intolerant, which is far less dangerous, so the staff may not have fully appreciated the danger - no excuse of course).

Maybe the staff were poorly trained/assigned unsuitable tasks, the processes for cascading allergy information or incidents were inadequate and/or the nursery was short staffed - that’s a failing of the business rather than the individual worker so they could bring a case against them.

That would send a message to the business, and others run in a similar way, that there are consequences to poorly managing nurseries.

It even says in the link that cases involving death, which is the discussion here, are rare.

As someone whose elder child had a dairy allergy, I definitely think the nursery were negligent. They were fully aware that it was dangerous to give him yogurt so they should have taken much more care. It's just the same as letting a child drink poison in his case.

It doesn't matter how much the workers are paid, it's literally their job to keep the children in their care safe and they failed in the most serious way possible.