Family mourns death of child; blames Kapiolani Medical Center nurse lockout for poor care

By Kristen Consillio

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    HONOLULU (KITV) — In her short life, Ava Agbayani was in and out of Kapiolani hospital after being born premature alongside her twin, Kailee.

Her father Tyson said he owes the twins lives to their nurses.

“They’re the whole reason they came home,” he said.

But they’re no longer there.

Instead, replaced by temporary hires.

“They were just bodies in the room —four or five of them just bodies in there—looking around not knowing what to do.”

When Ava was admitted into the hospital on Saturday for a cold that quickly developed into pneumonia, he said she waited six hours to get into a room.

The next day as her condition worsened, she waited hours again while staff figured out who was going to take care of her in the intensive care unit.

“She started to deteriorate, her oxygen stats were going down, she needed to be suctioned,” he said. “And we’re used to nurses coming to check on her, coming to check when her alarms were going off, but they didn’t come.”

So Tyson had to do the suctioning himself, and much more.

“I was the one changing the diapers, which is something I’m used to, but if I didn’t change it, nobody else was going to.”

Ava suffered from chronic lung disease, cerebral palsy and epilepsy, which her former nurses knew well.

“I just think the urgency wasn’t there,” Tyson added. “I hate to say this, but it just felt like they didn’t care. She’s fighting for her life in there and we hear the nurses saying things like, ‘Oh we’re going out dancing after this. We’ve been going out dancing every single night.’ and that hurts.”

Early Tuesday morning, Ava passed away.

In a statement, Kapiolani said, “Our heart goes out to this family. We treat the sickest and most medically fragile children in our state and the loss of any child is very painful. We are continuing to investigate, but at this time we have no reason to believe that what happened was due to the quality of care at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children.”

But Tyson believes otherwise.

“She wasn’t going to live our entire lifetime,” he said. “I think we’ve come to grips we were going to live longer than her. But she had so much left it wasn’t her time. I just feel like she was set so far back. She wasn’t given an opportunity—a fair chance to fight.”

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