Tony Chambers, former chief executive at the Countess of Chester Hospital, has been accused of being too slow to act on fears raised over babies' deaths.
The former medical director of Lucy Letby's hospital, Ian Harvey, is appearing before the Thirlwall Inquiry, giving evidence about how the hospital handled the case
Lady Justice Thirlwall asks Chambers if he ever felt that he was so busy he couldn’t get everything done in his role as CEO. Justice Thirlwall asks: "Do you think there are ever circumstances when people find you intimidating?" She asks him - given his degree in communications - whether he means that he was applying filters to what people were saying - and allowing for conscious or unconscious bias.She asks: "Would it be fair to assume that that would have affected the way you heard what the consultants were saying?”Lady Justice Thirlwall asks Tony Chambers about his visit to the neonatal unit in December 2015. He previously described the unit as “busy”.
Tony Chambers is quoted, in that meeting, as having said “if twins and triplets, why did the trust take them on?”. As a reminder, Chambers said in yesterday's evidence that he decided to contact police on 27 March 2017, but didn't write to the police until 2 May, after consulting a criminal barrister. The first meeting with police was 5 May.Richard Baker KC moves on to the failure to tell the babies’ families about concerns that a nurse had caused deliberate harm.
Chambers replies: "This is something in my reflections yesterday that I absolutely acknowledged that we hadn’t got right. We could have done better, we should have done better."These notes also show that Tony Chambers told the police that “it will become a wider GMC issue” and referred to the consultants “blocking the ability to move forward which creates a more difficult and dangerous environment for sick babies”.
Baker says: "You are making the point that you do not believe there’s any evidence to warrant a police investigation, and you are misleading the Cheshire Constabulary suggesting to them this matter has been fully investigated."Tony Chambers says, of the notes above, “These are not my notes, they’re from Sue Hodkinson. I've never seen these notes.
Chambers says with the Allitt case there was evidence of deliberate harm, to which Baker replies "there was evidence here!".
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