The grieving families of Lucy Letby’s victims have demanded the government orders a full independent public inquiry into how the nurse was able to go on a prolonged killing spree at a neonatal unit.
The families join senior doctors and MPs who want the inquiry upgraded, amid fears it lacks the powers needed to unearth potential evidence of a cover-up at the Countess of Chester Hospital, and prevent a similar horror from ever unfolding in the NHS again.
Health secretary Steve Barclay announced an independent inquiry on Friday after Letby was found guilty of murdering seven babies and the attempted murder of six others in the hospital where she worked between June 2015 and June 2016.
But he stopped short of setting up an inquiry with statutory powers, meaning witnesses will not be required by law to attend, raising concerns that hospital managers could avoid being held accountable for putting reputation before child safety.
Lawyers representing the families of two of Letby’s victims fear this may mean they will never truly get justice and labelled the current plan “inadequate”, while one of the doctors instrumental in finally stopping Letby’s heinous campaign demanded NHS bosses be forced to “acknowledge that their actions potentially facilitated a mass-murderer”.
In a joint statement, Richard Scorer and Yvonne Agnew of Slater and Gordon, who are representing two of the victims’ families, said: “As a non-statutory inquiry, it does not have the power to compel witnesses to provide evidence or production of documents and must rely on the goodwill of those involved to share their testimony. This is not good enough. The failings here are very serious and an inquiry needs to have a statutory basis to have real teeth.
“An inquiry also needs to look at why the NHS’s ‘duty of candour’ seems to have failed in this case, with hospital managers seemingly prioritising the hospital’s reputation above child safety.
“We do not believe that ‘duty of candour’ is an adequate substitute for a proper mandatory reporting regime, and any inquiry needs to examine this issue properly as failings here could be replicated elsewhere in the NHS.”
Senior doctors working with Letby warned for months that she had been the only medic present during the sudden collapses and deaths of a number of premature babies at the hospital in North West England.
However, their concerns were ignored and one consultant said babies could have been saved had hospital management acted sooner. But senior doctor Ravi Jayaram claimed he was persuaded not to contact the police because it would harm the hospital’s reputation.
Dr Jayaram, one of the doctors whose evidence helped convict Letby, called for “fundamental change in the culture and governance of NHS institutions”, adding that “it should start right now”.
He urged managers involved in the case, who are “still earning six-figure sums of taxpayers’ money or retired with their gold-plated pensions”, to “stand up in public to explain why they did not want to listen and do the right thing, to acknowledge that their actions potentially facilitated a mass murderer and to apologise to the families involved in all of this”.
The Countess of Chester Hospital is facing mounting questions over why Letby was not removed from the neonatal unit sooner. Concerns about her were first raised in June 2015 after three babies died over a period of two weeks. It was at this point Letby’s name was first mentioned among a group of consultants, one of whom was Dr Jayaram.
Despite this, she continued to work at the unit for a further 12 months until she was moved to clerical duties in July 2016 – after she had murdered seven newborn babies and tried to kill six others. The court heard that, on one occasion, a doctor walked into the room while she was suspected of being in the process of trying to kill a premature baby in February 2016.
Dr Susan Gilby, the hospital’s former chief executive who took over after Letby was arrested and has since left the trust, told The Independent she backed calls for a full public inquiry.
Letby was convicted of the murder of seven babies and attempted murder of six others
Dr Gilby commissioned an independant review of the management response to concerns raised by the paediatricians about Letby and called for it to be made public.
“The review should be complete by now. Provided all legal formalities are complete, the review needs to be shared with a public inquiry and with the families involved,” she said.
“When I met with the doctors on first joining the trust, I found them to be traumatised by the treatment they had received. I was shown evidence that they had been told to draw a line under the issues raised, forced to apologise to Letby and even to enter into mediation with her. It seemed that their clinical specialist knowledge had been disregarded.”
Conservative MP Dr Caroline Johnson said it was “completely unacceptable” that the hospital’s management did not immediately act on concerns flagged by the consultants.
Letby, who worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital between June 2015 and June 2016, on the day of her arrest
