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Lucy Letby: doctor who raised alarm calls for
regulation of NHS executives
Dr Stephen Brearey says officials ‘absolutely’ need to
be regulated in similar manner to medical practitioners
Geneva
Abdul
@GenevaAbdul
Tue 22 Aug
2023 09.45 BST
NHS
executives should be regulated similarly to medical practitioners, the
paediatrician who first raised the alarm on Lucy Letby has said, after
clinicians’ concerns about her were “turned on the head”.
The
behaviour and accountability of senior officials within the health service
“absolutely” needed to be regulated, said Dr Stephen Brearey, who first carried
out an urgent review into the nurse sentenced on Monday to a whole-life term
for the “sadistic” murders of seven babies.
“Doctors
and nurses all have the regulatory bodies that we have to answer to and quite
often we’ll see senior managers who have no apparent accountability for what
they do in our trusts and then move to other trusts,” Brearey told BBC Radio
4’s Today programme.
“You worry
about their future actions and there doesn’t seem to be any system to make them
accountable.”
Last week
the government announced an independent inquiry into how the neonatal nurse was
able to murder seven babies and attempt to kill six others. Pressure has been
mounting from bereaved families and experts calling to strengthen the
investigation to a statutory inquiry where witnesses would be compelled to give
evidence
On Tuesday,
a senior cabinet minister conceded a statutory inquiry was “on the table”. “I
was speaking to the prime minister yesterday and he made it really clear that
what we need to do is make sure the families get answers, we learn the lessons
as well, and it is a very transparent process that everyone can get behind,”
Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, told Times Radio.
“What will
happen next is there will be a chair appointed, the chair will work with the
families to look at the terms of reference, discuss the pros and cons of
different types of inquiry, and then they will come to a conclusion.”
Following
the unexplained deaths of seven babies in 2015, Brearey and other senior
doctors asked an independent expert to carry out a review. The report was
shared with the medical director of Countess of Chester hospital in 2016.
The
concerns were responded to in 2016 – by which time Letby had murdered five
babies – by a hospital manager who said there was “no evidence” against the
nurse “other than a coincidence”.
Brearey
said concerns raised by clinicians were “turned on the head”. An experience, he
said, that was not uncommon in the NHS. “You go to senior colleagues with a
problem and you come away confused and anxious because that problem is being
turned in a way in which you start to realise they’re seeing you as a problem
rather than the concern that you have,” he said.
Following
Letby’s conviction, detectives have started contacting more families believed
to be harmed by the nurse, including examining the records of more than 4,000
babies born at the Countess of Chester hospital and Liverpool Women’s hospital.
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