Lucy Letby: why wasn’t nurse caught sooner?

Lucy Letby has been jailed for life today, with no chance of parole, for the murder of seven newborns and attempting to kill another six, making her the most prolific baby killer in modern British history.

As shock at the scale of her horrific crimes continues to reverberate across the country, there is mounting anger at how the now 33-year-old nurse was allowed to get away with it for so long.

One father, whose twin boys survived Letby’s attempts to kill them, told The Sun simply: “I’m blaming the hospital.”

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What did the papers say?

The health service is facing calls for a public inquiry, said The Spectator’s Isabel Hardman, over claims that managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital did not respond to concerns about Letby’s presence at the mulitple deaths and collapses of babies between 2015 and 2016.

The whole saga is, “to put it politely, messy”, said Politico’s London Playbook, adding that Letby’s conviction has “opened the floodgates to a slew of reports about the way hospital managers handled consultants’ fears about the nurse”.

Staff reported being “fobbed off”, said Hardman, when they raised concerns about the nurse, and even after she was removed from frontline ward duties in 2016, managers “reportedly pushed for her to be reinstated”.

Perhaps most alarming are reports that senior paediatricians were told to apologise to Letby for suggesting she was somehow connected to the rise in unexplained infant deaths.

An external review into the hospital, which has yet to be published, is expected to reveal multiple failures by the Countess of Chester NHS Trust’s leadership to act on warnings, The Independent understands.

The news site claimed Letby “was free to target babies for nearly a year after she murdered her first patient as hospital leaders repeatedly ignored concerns raised by whistleblowers”.

“On up to ten occasions, suspicions were raised or events happened that linked her to the spike in deaths or collapses,” said the Daily Mail. But “hospital bosses refused to believe she was to blame” and were “desperate to protect the reputation of the trust”. The paper estimated as many as nine babies might have been saved or escaped harm had hospital managers and doctors not missed vital opportunities to stop her.

The problem, said The Times, is that many of the bosses who could have acted sooner to stop Letby have since “retired with big pensions or moved to lucrative new NHS jobs”.

Among these is the chief executive at the time, Tony Chambers, a former nurse who stepped down from the £160,000-a-year job shortly after Letby’s arrest in 2018. Medical director Ian Harvey, who also retired weeks after Letby’s arrest and now lives in France, is “accused of delaying calling in the police to investigate unexplained deaths on the neonatal ward”, said The Times. While Karen Rees, head of nursing for urgent care and one of Letby’s line managers, allegedly refused to remove her from duty after two babies died within 24 hours.

Chambers issued a statement after the guilty verdict saying he would cooperate fully with any inquiry and that “his focus was on the safety of the baby unit and the wellbeing of patients and staff”. Harvey also welcomed a forthcoming inquiry and said that he had been “determined to keep the baby unit safe and support our staff” when he was medical director.

“We never had hard evidence, but we had reached a point where we had explored every other cause. However, the consultant paediatricians didn’t feel there was any further work or investigation – short of a police investigation – that could be done that would satisfy them that some of the deaths weren’t due to natural causes,” he told ITV News.

Rees told Sky News she wasn’t given enough information to justify removing Letby from her duties and that she was “currently taking legal advice about the untrue allegations” made against her.

Police investigating Letby, who was today handed 14 whole-life orders, suggested chances might have been missed because the scale of what was going on was beyond the comprehension of many of her colleagues and those in senior positions at the hospital.

“It was the inability of those around Letby to imagine that a nurse would be deliberately killing babies that allowed her to cause harm for so long, even when it was happening right in front of them,” said the i news site.

Detective Chief Inspector Nicola Evans, who co-led the investigation into Letby, put it more bluntly: “Nobody was looking, because why would they? Why would they expect that this would occur?”

What next?

There are growing calls for the government’s inquiry into the scandal – which was announced on Friday following Letby’s conviction – to be beefed up.

Health Secretary Steve Barclay said a non-statutory inquiry would allow lessons to be learned in the quickest way possible. But over the weekend, the former justice secretary Robert Buckland, health committee chair Steve Brine and crossbench peer and former General Medical Council member Alex Carlile joined calls from grieving parents for it to be put on a statutory footing. This would see it led by a judge and have more powers, including being able to force witnesses to appear.

As with inquiries into previous healthcare killers like Harold Shipman, the Letby case could lead to “big changes in the way NHS staff are vetted and scrutinised”, said Hardman.

For other workers, she concluded, “it has damaged the bond of trust they have with their ward colleagues in high pressure situations – and the trust that parents put in the people they leave their tiny, desperately vulnerable babies with”.