Heatstroke and heat exhaustion can be deadly for young children. It is no surprise that kids are vulnerable to heat stroke when they are in the care of someone other than their parent – like at daycare.
Heat stroke can be the result of many different failures by the daycare. Ultimately, heat stroke is the result of a child being left exposed to hot temperatures for too long.
The most common causes of heat stroke at daycare that we see as daycare injury lawyers are:
- Children being forgotten in hot daycare vans or buses.
- We have handled cases where a daycare has forgotten a child on a bus or van at drop-off, pick-up, and field trips because they failed to perform the required safety checks of each seat and child in their care.
- These cases are very scary – because there is often no way for the child to communicate with an adult or escape on their own. Every parent knows that if the child is left alone in a vehicle, especially on hot days, they can suffer irreversible damage to the brain or even death.
- We have also seen heat stroke caused by kids being left on a playground for too long.
- In some cases, caregivers have forgotten kids outside for several hours because they didn’t run through routine checks to ensure all kids were re-entering the facility.
What’s important to note is that children are more likely than adults to become severely ill from overheating because their bodies do not regulate heat the same way adults do.
All heat related injuries in children are preventable. Daycares should have procedures in place to prevent these very incidents from happening. If these incidents do happen, it’s likely because daycare teachers were cutting corners and skipping important steps to keep kids safe.
Children should never be forgotten outside or in a van or a playground at daycare and put at risk of suffering a catastrophic injury or death.
If your child was the victim of a heatstroke or any other overheating injury at daycare, contact our daycare injury attorneys today. This should never have happened to your child and they deserve justice for what they went through.
You can also download our free guide, 5 Steps to Take After a Daycare Injury by clicking the link below. We wrote this guide to empower parents after something devastating has happened to their child at daycare.
Check out the guide, linked below. We’re here to help you and your family keep moving forward.
