Lucy Letby NHS trust chair says hospital bosses
misled the board
Sir Duncan Nichol says board was told there was ‘no
criminal activity pointing to any one individual’ after reviews in late 2016
Josh
Halliday North of England correspondent
Sun 20 Aug
2023 13.03 BST
The former
chair of the NHS trust where serial killer Lucy Letby worked has said the board
was “misled” by hospital executives.
Sir Duncan
Nichol, who was the board’s chair, said it was told there was “no criminal
activity pointing to any one individual” after two hospital-commissioned
reviews in late 2016.
However,
neither of these reviews was designed to investigate the concerns of senior
doctors that Letby might be behind a series of unexplained baby deaths on the
neonatal unit where she worked.
Letby, 33,
was on Friday found guilty of murdering seven babies and trying to kill another
six at the Countess of Chester hospital between June 2015 and June 2016. She
was cleared of two counts of attempted murder and a jury was unable to reach
verdicts on a further six attempted murder charges.
A
government-commissioned inquiry will examine why the children’s nurse was
allowed to continue on the unit despite senior doctors raising concerns about
her for months.
Executives
who had spent months saying there was no evidence against Letby commissioned
two reviews following her removal from the unit in July 2016.
One of the
reviews, by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, was into the
general operation of the neonatal unit but recommended a “thorough external
independent review of each unexpected neonatal death”.
The
hospital then asked Dr Jane Hawdon, a neonatologist, to examine the case notes
of a number of babies who had died between 2015 and 2016.
Hawdon is
understood to have told Ian Harvey, the hospital’s medical director, that she
did not have the time to conduct the thorough investigation the royal college
had recommended.
Her
five-page report, which the Guardian has seen, was completed in October 2016
and suggested a “broader forensic review” into the deaths of four babies
because “after independent clinical review these deaths remain unexpected and
unexplained”.
Nichol, who
announced his retirement from the trust in November 2019, said in a statement
to the BBC: “I believe that the board was misled in December 2016 when it
received a report on the outcome of the external, independent case reviews.
“We were
told explicitly that there was no criminal activity pointing to any one
individual, when in truth the investigating neonatologist had stated that she
had not had the time to complete the necessary in-depth case reviews.”
In response
to Nichol’s statement, the hospital’s then chief executive, Tony Chambers, said
that “what was shared with the board was honest and open and represented our
best understanding of the outcome of the reviews at the time”.
In January
2017, a month after these reports were shared with the board, Chambers told
senior doctors who had raised concerns about Letby that there was no evidence
against her and that she would be returning to work on the neonatal unit.
Chambers
ordered the consultants to apologise to the nurse and said he had spent hours
talking to her and her father about the distress caused by being removed from
the premature baby unit in July 2016.
He told the
consultant paediatricians to “draw a line” under the matter and said Letby’s
father had threatened to refer the doctors to the General Medical Council
unless they dropped their concerns. Following the verdicts, Chambers has said
he is deeply saddened by what has come to light and that he will cooperate
fully and openly with the inquiry.
Meanwhile
the Sunday Times reported Letby was even offered a placement at Alder Hey
children’s hospital by health service managers and support for a master’s
degree or advanced nurse training after she brought a grievance procedure in
September 2016. However a spokesperson for the hospital told the paper it had
no record of being approached about Letby.
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