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Lucy Letby probably killed or assaulted babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital before June 2015, when she murdered her first known victim, the consultant who was neonatal lead at the time has suggested.1
Asked at the Thirlwall inquiry whether he believed that the nurse had murdered or assaulted babies at the hospital before 8 June 2015, when Baby A was killed, Stephen Brearey replied, “I think that’s likely, yes.”
He said, “On reflection, I think it’s likely that Letby didn’t start becoming a killer in June 2015 and didn’t start harming babies in June 2015, and I think it’s likely that her actions prior to then changed what we perceived was abnormal.”
He told the inquiry into the circumstances surrounding her crimes that there were a number of unexpected collapses or deaths, which now appeared suspicious. He and his colleagues had no concerns at the time but just thought they were going through “a busy patch or a particularly difficult patch.”
He added, “We had a thermostat for a level of work and a number of events that we can’t quite understand. I think it was turned up over those years so that our perception of what is normal for a neonatal unit in terms of the number of collapses that you might expect in a week, a month, a year had changed.”
Letby is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder another seven between June 2015 and June 2016. Police were not called in to investigate until May 2017.2
Consultants pressed for Letby, who was present on every occasion, to be removed from the neonatal unit. Senior nurses were against the move but managers finally agreed, and she was moved to an administrative post in July 2016, after which the deaths stopped.
Letby filed a grievance, however, and the consultants were asked to apologise to her and go through a mediation process amid plans for her to return to the unit.
Brearey described a meeting in January 2017 between hospital executives and consultants as feeling “choreographed.” He added, “We were all quite stunned, really. As a sort of synopsis of executive behaviour, I can’t imagine there’s an example of anything more incompetent in the history of the NHS. How you can start a meeting saying you followed Speak Out Safely practices and then tell seven consultants who all have significant concerns that they are to apologise to the person and that she would be going back to work or else there will be consequences?”
By the time of a further meeting in March 2017, he told the inquiry in a statement, “the situation for consultants was becoming more desperate. Colleagues felt their jobs and careers were under threat, the prospect of Letby returning to work on the neonatal unit seemed imminent and we had done everything reasonable to raise our concerns within the trust without success.”
In the event, Letby never returned to the unit and managers finally agreed that police should be alerted in May 2017. Letby was arrested in July 2018.
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