Families need answers from the trust that allowed preventable deaths to happen
The murder of premature babies in their first few weeks of life by a medical professional is impossible to make sense of. But this is the crime of which Lucy Letby, a nurse in the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital, was last week convicted in relation to a number of vulnerable infants entrusted to her care. They were utterly dependent on the clinical staff in that unit. But Letby murdered seven babies, attacking some multiple times before she succeeded in killing them.
The government has announced an independent inquiry into how the Letby murders were handled by the Countess of Chester hospital, but has so far declined to put it on a statutory footing. This is not good enough. The criminal trial and the reporting around it have highlighted evidence of grievous failings by thetrust that runs the hospital, but no one from hospital management was required to give evidence in the trial.
In particular, the inquiry must ask why no investigation into these unexplained baby deaths was ordered by hospital management until July 2016, more than a year after doctors first raised concerns. Two reviews in the second half of 2016, one by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the second by a premature baby expert, recommended a thorough external independent review of each neonatal death and further forensic investigation; neither of these things happened.
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