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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.
