Merged Concerns over baby killer ignored? / Nurse Lucy Letby killed babies in her care

[catsmate]

Here's a website by some people claiming, like Planigale, that there is minimal physical evidence against Letby. It's 30,000 words long, and mostly way above my pay grade, so maybe someone much smarter and more qualified than me will come along and explain why it's right/wrong.

https://rexvlucyletby2023.com/

A quick skim suggest it's acomprehensive snow job but little actual hard science. Also lots of allegations of misconduct on the part of expert witnesses that should, if the claims had any validity, been referred to the professional registration bodies.

 

[Darat]

Here's a website by some people claiming, like Planigale, that there is minimal physical evidence against Letby. It's 30,000 words long, and mostly way above my pay grade, so maybe someone much smarter and more qualified than me will come along and explain why it's right/wrong.

https://rexvlucyletby2023.com/

Interesting only read a couple of screenfuls. If they support their main declaration

"The case against Lucy Letby lacked scientific evidence and is based on unverified hypotheses

Based upon published peer-reviewed research, and with the guidance, advice, and insights of other scientists, it is the view of Science on Trial that the scientific information put before the court by the expert witnesses is very simply inaccurate, misleading, and in many places false. The expert witnesses in this case are likely aware that the claims they have made lack necessary scientific findings, and if they were to write these claims up and attempt to submit them for publication, their submission would be quickly rejected."

Then it will be concerning, especially in light of other cases in which convictions were (assumed) to be heavily influenced by the expert advice put to the jury but later on found out to be wrong and the convictions quashed etc.

 

[Planigale]

It is not about 'demonizing the administrators'. The average salary of a Hospital Administrator in the UK is £267,000 pa. It is true that this type of plum job is generally reserved for those in class-ridden UK with the right old school tie, right connections & recommendations and the support of family wealth whilst qualifying. But the fat cat salary and pension isn't a reward for having a plummy accent, although you might be forgiven for thinking it is. This salary level represents the degree of responsibility. If something goes wrong under your watch, sorry, but you do have to take some responsibility for it. Ignorance is no excuse. There is a statute that makes Gross Negligence Manslaughter by a professional a criminal offence, so it is nonsense to say the serial killings of Lucy Letby have nothing to do with the management. They are answerable to the law just like everyone else.

When seven highly specialised consultants reported their concerns, the hospital administrators had a duty of care to take them seriously. The trite corporate speak 'We take all complaints seriously' isn't something they can just do by choice, they have a responsibility to take complaints seriously, especially so where weak, defenseless and vulnerable premature neonates are the focus of the complaint.

The average salary of a hospital administrator is not £267,000. You may be referring to the the average CEO salary. top level NHS management has a CEO who is supposed to be strategic, a director of finance, a director of nursing, and a medical directo, sometimes a director of public healthr. Sitting below them will be a COO (chief operating officer who runs things on a day to fay basis) directors of planning, IT, HR, PR etc. The highest paid executive (usually) is not the CEO but the medical director, who probably has least direct power.

 

[Planigale]

Interesting only read a couple of screenfuls. If they support their main declaration


Then it will be concerning, especially in light of other cases in which convictions were (assumed) to be heavily influenced by the expert advice put to the jury but later on found out to be wrong and the convictions quashed etc.

I think the evidence in any individual case is weak, it is the whole cloth that is convincing. An interesting observation is that in any one year the unit would expect 3 sudden deaths in one year there were 14, all of which were when Letby was on duty. It is conceivable that one or more of the deaths she was accused of causing were in fact natural, but not the whole lot.

 

[jimbob]

Here's a website by some people claiming, like Planigale, that there is minimal physical evidence against Letby. It's 30,000 words long, and mostly way above my pay grade, so maybe someone much smarter and more qualified than me will come along and explain why it's right/wrong.

https://rexvlucyletby2023.com/

I don't buy it.

It wasn't just the statistics, but also evidence from her house.

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/lucy-letbys-written-note-released-25256352

It's not like the vile idea of looking at the baseline rate of cot deaths and then seeing that a mother lost three kids, and saying that's it should be 0.27^3 in a billion, ignoring the role of congenital factors. It was a nurse who stood out amongst the other nurses, who had concerns raised by her colleagues, and from the released evidence had written

'I don't deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I'm not good enough'. 'I am a horrible evil person' and in capital letters, 'I AM EVIL I DID THIS'."

She was found standing near the kids and independent investigation concluded that at least some were attacked by injection of air or other substances in other cases.

So any statistics that doesn't account for the fact that there was foul play is not going to be right.

 

[lionking]

I think the evidence in any individual case is weak, it is the whole cloth that is convincing. An interesting observation is that in any one year the unit would expect 3 sudden deaths in one year there were 14, all of which were when Letby was on duty. It is conceivable that one or more of the deaths she was accused of causing were in fact natural, but not the whole lot.

Yes, that is a very hard argument to counter.

 

[Vixen]

Here's a website by some people claiming, like Planigale, that there is minimal physical evidence against Letby. It's 30,000 words long, and mostly way above my pay grade, so maybe someone much smarter and more qualified than me will come along and explain why it's right/wrong.

https://rexvlucyletby2023.com/

It relates to Dr. Richard Gill of Lieden University, Netherlands, who is a mathematician and help overturn the conviction of an Italian medic in Italy who was accused of two patient murders. Her conviction was deemed unsafe, with his help, when he showed that the statistical values used by the prosecution expert witness was flawed.

This doesn't apply to the Letby case. Her criminal charges were not based on flawed statistics. Just because one such case was flawed, doesn't mean all of them are.

Each case has to be assessed on their own individual merits.

For example, in the USA recently a Dr. Hussel [_sp?) was acquitted after a five week trial of having despatched dozens of elderly patients. He did indeed give them ten times the amount of fentanyl than the prescribed recommendation. The jury's reasoning seems to have been that these patients were about to die anyway. [Shrug]

But it doesn't follow that the Letby case should also be acquitted because the neonates were premature and under intensive care.

 

[Vixen]

The average salary of a hospital administrator is not £267,000. You may be referring to the the average CEO salary. top level NHS management has a CEO who is supposed to be strategic, a director of finance, a director of nursing, and a medical directo, sometimes a director of public healthr. Sitting below them will be a COO (chief operating officer who runs things on a day to fay basis) directors of planning, IT, HR, PR etc. The highest paid executive (usually) is not the CEO but the medical director, who probably has least direct power.

I was going by this website here from the Economic Research Institute: https://www.erieri.com/salary/job/hospital-administrator/united-kingdom/london

Last updated: August 22, 2023

Hospital Administrator Salary
in London, United Kingdom
This page is a promotion for ERI’s Assessor Series and is not intended for professional use.
Professionals should subscribe to ERI’s Assessor Series.

£266,719 (GBP)
Average Salary

£128/hr
Average Hourly

£76,948
Average Bonus

OK, it does say 'London'. However, Tony Chambers who was the HA - now seems to be called CEO instead [used to be the term for the head of a PLC or private Limited Company] - was on well over £120,000 plus bonuses. When he left CoCH he had various short-term contracts for other trusts where he easily earned the equivalent of £150K upwards as a regional HA, or Director of Health (or whatever the fancy title is these days). The next bod down, Dr Ian Harvey, a former orthopaedic surgeon, was similarly paid and left shortly after Letby's arrest on a £1.5m pension and moved to France.

Eiran Powell was the manager of the neonatal unit and Alison Rees, now Moore, was the director of nursing. These would have been nursing bods on circa £100K. Karen Rees was some kind of HA or CEO or 'Director of Health' and probably a non-medic.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

Interesting only read a couple of screenfuls. If they support their main declaration


Then it will be concerning, especially in light of other cases in which convictions were (assumed) to be heavily influenced by the expert advice put to the jury but later on found out to be wrong and the convictions quashed etc.

I'm kind of worried that, rather than conviceting a serial killer, a Lucia de Berk situation has just been created. There's virtually no physical evidence of any wrongdoing, no confession and about the only concrete evidence of anything dodgy happening is that Ms Letby was on the ward when all the babies died.

 

[jimbob]

I'm kind of worried that, rather than conviceting a serial killer, a Lucia de Berk situation has just been created. There's virtually no physical evidence of any wrongdoing, no confession and about the only concrete evidence of anything dodgy happening is that Ms Letby was on the ward when all the babies died.

And the post it note in her diary saying that she killed them on purpose.
And the fact that she had falsified medical records

 

[Matthew Best]

I think the evidence in any individual case is weak, it is the whole cloth that is convincing. An interesting observation is that in any one year the unit would expect 3 sudden deaths in one year there were 14, all of which were when Letby was on duty. It is conceivable that one or more of the deaths she was accused of causing were in fact natural, but not the whole lot.

The website says this:

"It has been repeatedly claimed that the number of deaths at CoCH increased in 2015 and 2016, and the implication was that these two years were unique in the number of infant deaths.

The number of perinatal deaths in 2017 and 2018 was higher than in 2015 and 2016, but Lucy Letby was not on the ward in these years."

Is this correct?

 

[Vixen]

I think the evidence in any individual case is weak, it is the whole cloth that is convincing. An interesting observation is that in any one year the unit would expect 3 sudden deaths in one year there were 14, all of which were when Letby was on duty. It is conceivable that one or more of the deaths she was accused of causing were in fact natural, but not the whole lot.

That is not so. When the consultants on the neonatal unit brought their concerns to Eiran Powell, Alison Kelly and Ian Harvey, it was brushed off as 'just a coincidence' that Letby had been on duty for the 400% increase in neonatal deaths on the unit. In addition, these further deaths had not been properly input onto the NHS database so no red flag came up. Lucy Letby had been key with the nursing directors, Powell, Kelly and director Harvey is also pictured in a local paper standing next to Letby hailing the raising of £1.5m towards a new neonatal unit.

As professional managers Harvey - and certainly Chambers - would have been trained in Corporate Governance, which includes protecting one's objectivity. This means when faced in your professional life, threats to your objectivity to carry out your role (in Corporate Governance aka, professional ethics) you have to protect yourself and recognise what could compromise your objectivity. Threats to objectivity include threats, intimidation, bribery and in this case, familiarity. Letby was clearly seen as an outstanding asset by the nursing managers and Harvey, appearing as she did as a poster girl for their 'Baby-Gro compaign. The threat to their objectivity which they had a duty of care to recognise was that of familiarity. The remedy for this is to recuse oneself and refer the issue to an truly objective body - that is what the Non-Executive Directors (NED's) are there for!!! - or an outside body such as a lawyer firm of HR or another hospital or as eventually happened, the RCPCH (the Royal College of Paeditricians and Child Health) were brought in to review the concerns. A Dr. Hawdon of this independent body recommended that four of the deaths should be investigated.

This never happened, with Tony Chambers HA declaring Letby innocent and that she should return to the neonatal unit. He had been consorting with Lucy Letby's father and had been seen in a cafe having coffee with Letby after she had been taken off duty and put on a desk job. What has Letby's father got to do with any of this? Chambers said that Mr John Letby told him that Lucy Letby had done nothing wrong. Sorry, but I smell something deeply disturbing here, especially when Alison Kelly et al had contrived to get Lucy Letby onto a sponsored MA course and a prestigious placement at Alder Hey hospital, one of UK's best Children's Hospitals.. In addition, Ian Harvey insisted the hospital consultants stopped putting their concerns in emails, thus leaving an email trail, and further they had better apologise to Lucy Letby or they would be referred to the GMC. Under this pressure the consultants sent the killer and her father a written apology.

Consultant Dr Stephen Brearley, who was first to issue a complaint about Letby, went to Chester Police - some two years along the line - and as Dr Ravi Jayaram says in an interview, he punched the air in delight, when DC Nigel Wenham agreed to investigate. Within days of this, Dr Brearly was scrolling through the notes of recent neonatal deaths and came across the smoking gun and hard evidence that a recent baby had 4,567 units of insulin in his blood stream on his final pathology tests. The average insulin level for a neonatal is 200 - 300 units of insulin. In addition, the C-Peptide level was near zero. This was hard definitive proof that the baby had been administered a lethal amount of insulin.

From thereon, the police soon collated all the evidence they needed. Lucy Letby didn't even bother to put up a defence.

It is simply not true that 'there is no hard evidence' and that 'it is all based on statistics'.

Had the managerial staff at Countess of Chester Hospital bothered to instigate a proper investigation when the consultants voiced their professional concerns, then the two baby triplets would still be alive today.

'It's only circumstantial evidence' - stuff and nonsense!!!

When Dr Gilby took over from Tony Chambers as HA, CEO, Director of Health or Whatevs, she was shocked to see in Chambers' handover instructions that she was to report eight consultants to the GMC.


I believe there are enough concerns over the behaviour of Chambers, Harvey, Rees-Moore, Kelly and Powell for them to be investigated for criminal gross professional negligence.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

I was going by this website here from the Economic Research Institute: https://www.erieri.com/salary/job/hospital-administrator/united-kingdom/london

Doesn't give any sources for how the info was derived, just vague comments on surveys; doesn't say it is NHS. For reference, official government figures on NHS salaries are derived directly from NHS payroll departments (folk like the one across the table from me)

The NHS has not had any such title as "hospital administrator" for decades; by most standards, Carrot Flower Queen was a hospital administrator, as she was involved in admininstrating hospitals, whether by directly paying staff or by training staff to operate new IT systems. She was paid nowhere near those sums.

The NHS careers site defines "administrators" as the likes of clerks, secretaries, receptionists, PA, records staff, telephonists, ward clerks on mostly Bands 2, 3 and 4, possibly a few going up to 5.

Managers are a whole nuther thing...

 

[Vixen]

The website says this:

"It has been repeatedly claimed that the number of deaths at CoCH increased in 2015 and 2016, and the implication was that these two years were unique in the number of infant deaths.

The number of perinatal deaths in 2017 and 2018 was higher than in 2015 and 2016, but Lucy Letby was not on the ward in these years."

Is this correct?

It is misleading. Deaths stopped after Letby was stopped. The neonatal unit was then down graded to exclude very ill babies because of the scandal.

Before Lucy Letby arrived in 2015 there had been no more than two or three deaths a year, Between 2015 and 2016 it quadrupled alarmingly and Letby was present on every occasion. As soon as she got back from holiday in Ibiza 'with a bang LOL' the killings resumed with the two triplets within 24 hours. The parents wisely insisted the third triplet be moved to another hospital all together, which meant the mother had to discharge herself from the CoCH maternity ward despite still being in a wheelchair.

People who can't see that Letby was guilty are understandably in denial and blind to the obvious because it is something that is very hard to get one's head around.

 

[Vixen]

Doesn't give any sources for how the info was derived, just vague comments on surveys; doesn't say it is NHS. For reference, official government figures on NHS salaries are derived directly from NHS payroll departments (folk like the one across the table from me)

The NHS has not had any such title as "hospital administrator" for decades; by most standards, Carrot Flower Queen was a hospital administrator, as she was involved in admininstrating hospitals, whether by directly paying staff or by training staff to operate new IT systems. She was paid nowhere near those sums.

The NHS careers site defines "administrators" as the likes of clerks, secretaries, receptionists, PA, records staff, telephonists, ward clerks on mostly Bands 2, 3 and 4, possibly a few going up to 5.

Managers are a whole nuther thing...

Obviously, we are not talking about administrators as in the usual public sector bands of Clerical Officers, Higher Clerical Officers, Band this and Band that. Grade this or Grade that, so beloved of the Civil Service.

One thing about Brits, is that they love understatement. For example, when Dr Harvey was an orthopaedic surgeon, he was 'Mr. Harvey'.

 

[Matthew Best]

It is misleading. Deaths stopped after Letby was stopped.

Misleading? It says perinatal deaths went up, you say they stopped. When you describe something as "misleading", the sense I take away is that, while technically correct, it hides a bigger truth. But you seem to be saying that their figures are completely wrong, not just misleading.

 

[Vixen]

Misleading? It says perinatal deaths went up, you say they stopped. When you describe something as "misleading", the sense I take away is that, while technically correct, it hides a bigger truth. But you seem to be saying that their figures are completely wrong, not just misleading.

What is the difference between perinatal and neonatal death?
The perinatal period commences at 22 completed weeks (154 days) of gestation and ends seven completed days after birth. The neonatal period begins with birth and ends 28 complete days after birth. Google front page

Neonatal Nurse Lucy Letby worked in the neonatal unit.

 

[Darat]

The website says this:

"It has been repeatedly claimed that the number of deaths at CoCH increased in 2015 and 2016, and the implication was that these two years were unique in the number of infant deaths.

The number of perinatal deaths in 2017 and 2018 was higher than in 2015 and 2016, but Lucy Letby was not on the ward in these years."

Is this correct?

Been looking for the statistics but my googlefu is letting me down today, found this article which links to some data but not got all the way through the links yet: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-statistics-prove-accused-nurse-lucy-letby-innocent-elston-fgs/

ETA: Looks like this is the one that has the deaths:

Document 5: Number of deaths (monthly) by type (late fetal loss, stillbirth, early neonatal, late neonatal, post neonatal) at the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, January 2013 to October 2018 - Freedom of Information Request Link: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/requ...2/attach/3/FOI 4568.docx?cookie_passthrough=1

 

[Darat]

What is the difference between perinatal and neonatal death?
The perinatal period commences at 22 completed weeks (154 days) of gestation and ends seven completed days after birth. The neonatal period begins with birth and ends 28 complete days after birth. Google front page

Neonatal Nurse Lucy Letby worked in the neonatal unit.

The document I link to above breaks down the deaths.

 

[Matthew Best]

Thanks for that, Darat. It seems it's not quite as cut and dried as it seemed in the popular press. I guess it never is.

The rate of neonatal deaths in Chester was actually higher in 2018 and 2019, after Letby had been removed (though the raw figures were lower, because the neonatal unit was downgraded in 2016 and no longer allowed to care for risky births).

However, I don't think any of this will help Letby - statistics are hard to understand and explain, and she's an evil baby murderer, so I think any campaign to get her off on appeal is doomed to failure.

But it's still interesting to read about.