Warnings about Lucy Letby weren’t acted on – says doctor who worked with serial killer nurse



“One’s heart would sink when you saw Lucy Letby there again.” In his first interview consultant peadiatrician Dr John Gibbs who worked with the serial killer nurse tells Channel 4 News hospital managers were warned about the presence of Letby when several babies died.

He told Clare Fallon he became ‘very worried’ about ‘something abnormal that couldn’t be medically explained’ happening to babies on the unit.

And says if his concerns and those of his colleagues had been listened to ‘police would have been called in a lot earlier’.

Lucy Letby has been found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others while working as a nurse at the Countess of Chester hospital.

Medical director at the Countess of Chester, Dr Nigel Scawn, says they are “extremely sorry” that the crimes happened in their hospital and that “significant changes” have been made to its services since Lucy Letby worked there.

source

21 thoughts on “Warnings about Lucy Letby weren’t acted on – says doctor who worked with serial killer nurse”

  1. Dr Brearey I understand what you are saying, but surely on reflection you should have done more. We all have a duty as a citizen to call out suspected crime, but more so those under the Hippocratic oath. Consultants are very powerful. The executives also have vicarious liability, but also, who else was around? It does not all add up as several experts have said. There is much more to this than just Lucy.

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  2. Lock them all up, nobody is irreplaceable. If you're in a position where people trust you with their lives, you can't be covering up for a serial killer. I wouldn't even want to go to a hospital these days, with people like this in charge and people like that working under them, I'd sooner trust myself to stitch up my own wounds. Oddly enough, this all reeks of corporate corruption, this is exactly the kind of bullshit you'd expect from them – passing the buck, playing dumb, pressuring employees to play along – and the NHS has been knee-deep in this kind of drama ever since the push for private healthcare. Coincidence, or yet another little scheme?

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  3. What I don't understand is why doctors didn't call the police themselves. Yes, it's good to report these things to the administration but when the administration did not agree, couldn't they simply have called the police. Yes, they might have been fired but so what?

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  4. WHY are the Administrators and Supervisors not being exposed-the ones who would not act on the Doctors report. THEY are as guilty as Letby for the infants killed after that time, and they should GO TO PRISON also.

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  5. As an American, I appreciate the Doctor's candor and sensitive information about the murders. So much more human than anything one will hear from the same level of spokesperson in the United States. Of course this includes all politicians. Mel Gibson said it best "you can't agree on the color of shite." Now we can't even say what a woman is.

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  6. I'm sorry but if you have these suspicions then some things are more important than your job. Whilst these managers are deplorable for not listening, you would have to insist as one of these doctors that this was taken seriously. Another solution would have been to install either covert or none covert cctv. Even in 2015 there would have been something suitable for not a massive cost

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  7. Another possibility is that Lucy is innocent! I know that may seem crazy, on the face of it, but things are actually very murky. So, in what follows, I'm not claiming that Lucy is innocent. Instead, I'm just claiming that it is a real possibility that Lucy is innocent. Let me explain …

    So, what we know for certain is just that a bunch of babies died, without any apparent explanation, circumstantial evidence points to Lucy and she has been found guilty by a jury. What I want to show is that these 3 facts are consistent with Lucy's innocence in a way that is plausible (could be true without too much of a stretch). My theory (see below) has the advantage that it doesn't invoke any nefarious motives or conspiracies involving doctors, hospital management, police, judge or jury. It also explains why hospital management were so reluctant to act against Lucy and why it took so long for Lucy to finally be arrested and convicted.

    I suggest that nurses in neonatal wards are in a unique position of great trust. They could rather easily, if they were so inclined, murder babies without leaving any hard evidence. They have the means and the opportunity, but one hopes that they don't have the motive. Anyway, I suggest that suspect nurses have to be able to be convicted on purely circumstantial evidence, or else they cannot be convicted at all and other potentially killer nurses would know that. Therefore, the burden of proof in Lucy's trial had to be significantly lower than in a regular murder trial. Basically, circumstances prevented Lucy from being given a fair trial. Her guilt didn't have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt. The justice system does not normally sacrifice a potentially innocent person for the sake of the greater good, but cases like this could be an exception, given that the stakes are so very high, with the fragile lives of newborn babies at stake. The judge may have directed the jury to a guilty verdict, or at least refrained from directing the jury away from a guilty verdict and just let "child abuse hysteria" decide the case. I think I'm correct in saying that Lucy's eventual arrest and trial wasn't as a result of any new incriminating evidence having been uncovered. Instead, it was just a reassessment of the existing circumstantial evidence. There seems to have been a protracted debate, behind the scenes, over whether or not to proceed against Lucy on the basis of that circumstantial evidence. On the one hand, she had to be convicted to deter any other potential killer nurses, given that hard evidence is very hard to come by in these cases. On the other hand, they were effectively condemning a well liked 33 year old nurse, who may very well have been innocent of any crime, to a trial that pretty much had to find her guilty. A true ethical dilemma?

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