A California couple sued The Bay Clubs Company, LLC, a luxury country club daycare facility, alleging their son suffered serious injuries while at the facility.

In March, the 23-month-old child was dropped off at the daycare facility at about 8:30 a.m. by his father. 

The video shows that, at about 9:20 a.m. a daycare employee was playing with the child and swinging him by the arms. The employee held the child's hands, swung him between her legs, swung him up into the air over her head, and released his hands.

The employee had her hands out to catch the child but failed to do so as the momentum of the swing caused him to fly in an arc over her head. As a result, the child fell to the floor behind her. The employee lost her balance while attempting to catch him and fell backward, landing on top of the child.

At 9:28 the child's father alleged he received a message from the daycare stating his son had "fallen", was now calm, and that pick up would not be needed. When the father called back minutes later, he was allegedly told his son was not injured and agreed to pick him up at the scheduled time.

About 15 minutes later, the daycare called again asking the father to pick up the child as they were not able to calm him down. Upon pickup, the father states his son had severe injuries in direct contradiction of the earlier claim that he had not been injured.

The child's right eye was swollen shut, his face was bruised, and his mouth was swollen according to the family's lawsuit. Further, the child was "extremely drowsy, lethargic, and irritable".

After the family later contacted the daycare, an employee allegedly told them a staff member was holding the child and fell while squatting down with the child about one and a half feet above the ground.

Doctors diagnosed the child with blunt head trauma, a concussion, and a facial abrasion. Medical staff allegedly questioned whether these injuries were consistent with the daycare's claim that the child fell from a short distance.

One month after the incident, the child was evaluated by a neurology specialist who stated he was still experiencing concussion symptoms and traumatic brain injury symptoms.

The family was able to access video surveillance of the incident showing the worker swinging their child, the fall, and the worker falling on top of the child.

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-parents-sue-luxury-daycare-toddler-allegedly-tossed-air-dropped-head

Commentary

In the above case, the daycare did not accurately report what happened to the toddler, presumably, in an attempt to cover up negligence. As a result, the injury to the child and the harm to the parents was increased. This is a bad result for the family, but also significantly increases liability exposure for the daycare center - moving from negligence or gross negligence to possibly intent to cause emotional harm to the family or further negligence that leads to even more harm to the child.

When a child is injured, child safe environments generate an incident report. The purpose of the incident report is to document the facts that led to an incident; in this case, an injury caused by carelessness by an adult caretaker.

When verbally reporting or writing an incident report, staff may be tempted to stay silent, lie, misdirect, downplay or otherwise blur what happened. As in the above matter, by not relaying the full truth, the staff likely caused more harm to the child (which needed to be treated with concussion protocols) and left the organization open to charges of intentional infliction of emotional distress or even criminal charges.

Child safe environments should document incidents in a contemporaneous, accurate, and well-documented manner, following standards created for such events, no matter the facts of the incident.

For proper incident reports, consider the following:

· Require all staff members that witnessed an incident to write a report in their own words, without a supervisor and/or the employee central to the event present if applicable

· Capture the time, location, witness information, what occurred before, during, and after the incident, and what was communicated to parents/guardians in the report

· Preserve surveillance video capturing the incident

· Prohibit deletion of surveillance video if an incident occurred, pausing any routine periodic video deletion

· Restrict/lock down access to surveillance video, logging who accessed it and when

· Prohibit editing or replacing original incident reports

· Allow only corrections or updates to incident reports, attached as an addendum to the original report

· Provide training to all staff members regarding the importance of incident reports and their obligation to provide truthful, contemporaneous accounts of everything they did or witnessed relating to an incident