Lucy Letby Court Case

[Pebble21uk]

Today has been the first day of the trial, which is expected to last for six months. One thread has already been pulled on the subject. Upon deletion MNHQ said that a thread about the case is fine but please read the rules around contempt of court before posting... these are copied and pasted here:
Publicly commenting on a court case:

You might be in contempt of court if you speak publicly or post on social media.
For example, you should not:
say whether you think a person is guilty or innocent
refer to someone’s previous convictions
name someone the judge has allowed to be anonymous, even if you did not know this
name victims, witnesses and offenders under 18
name sex crime victims
share any evidence or facts about a case that the judge has said cannot be made public

If any of the above take place then new threads will also be pulled. Let's please try and keep it going!

The questions around notetaking by LL have been raised again by the prosecution. Child I's mother - ( there were no immediate concerns around Child I ) said that LL expressed concern about the child and Child I would need reviewing by a doctor. In the notes LL said it was the mother who had expressed concern.
This isn't the first time that the prosecution have claimed LL notes are a reverse of who expressed concern.

I know this is only preliminary evidence setting, but so far there already seems to be quite a lot of overly mixed and confused information. There seems to be a clear case of lack of good care overall, and the hospital aren’t exactly shining out as a place of amazing health care in which the murder and attempted murder allegations are a huge anomaly. It will be interesting to see the defence.

I have to agree, no matter what the outcome of this trial, the hospital is going to come out of this looking very very bad.

I think reading the live updates regarding Child I I'm finding it really distressing. My DH has asked me to step away from it and I think I'm going to have to 😥

Good practice is that nurses keep contemporaneous notes. So nurses shouldn't have to 'recall all that happened on shift' because they should be noting it all as it happened. However, when things get busy, or your patient is sick and requiring a lot of care, it is easy to get behind with the notes and then have to catch up after the shift has ended, or towards the end of the shift.

In terms of googling patients, I saw an incidence once in my career and it was taken very seriously. It's an absolutely unacceptable thing to do.

Units run differently across the country, although the standards are the same across all units. Where I was, it wasn't uncommon to have 4 babies allocated across 2 rooms on different sides of the unit, so 2 of the babies were necessarily left unattended while a nurse dealt with the other two. If a nurse was allocated 6 special care babies, they would have to leave them all unattended while they fetched milk/medication/supplies. However, it sounds like these babies were HDU/ITU babies rather than special care, so more likely to have a nurse there at all times.

I’m struggling to understand what they’re saying the method of killing child I was. Does anyone else understand please?

Child I’s case is really upsetting me. It’s horrific. She was so resilient but just couldn’t take it any more 😔

If that was the case ,would they be able to find a guilty verdict for some and not others ?

I think that the prosecution are arguing that there was a significant amount of air found in Child I from their feed- their suggestion being that it was large enough that it had to have been administered by someone.

LL also sent an Sympathy card to the parents of Child I, which was not a normal occurrence. A photo of the card was found on her phone.

@TheIsaacs it looks like they are accusing her of administering air into the NGT and trying to create an air bolus. And one of the contributing factors to the death was that the earlier crashes/incidents had caused brain damage which caused lack of oxygen to the brain.

“As the mum bathed her recently deceased child, Lucy Letby came into the room and, in the words of the mum, "was smiling and kept going on about how she was present at [Child I']s first bath and how much [Child I] had loved it.”

this extract has left me feeling chilled

I trained as a nurse long before social media was a thing, but nurses are advised to be very careful on social media ,keeping settings tight ,not posting anything that might be inflammatory about the trust etc

I agree its very odd to repeatedly search for patients families on social media ,but giving her the benefit of the doubt it was something she did in the privacy of her own home.

@Pebble21uk @TheTantrumoftheToddlerIsThere thank you

Child H might be a difficult one to judge just because of the child’s previous problems and the hospital’s sub standard care. The prosecution seem to be going with the approach that whilst all these things happened before they were in LL’s care, they were explainable. But the two incidents surrounding LL had no medical explanations (as per registrar) and were uncharacteristic, and therefore it’s more sinister (fitting with their narrative).

But I think this case is going to be hard to judge. I wouldn’t feel comfortable having to make a ‘no doubt’ judgement on this one.

No words :(

In interview LL said she had little recollection of Child J. She was not Child J's designated nurse but was present around the time of her deterioration as door entry data to the room had recorded her entry.
Medical experts said Child J presented signs of a seizure consistent with smothering / lack of oxygen. Child J survived and has had no seizures since. A further medical expert said that the seizure could be consistent with an infection.
She also searched for Child J's parents on FB. LL said she had no recollection of doing so.

The prosecution have put forward many different methods of attempted murder amongst these cases.

By the time of Child K at least one doctor present was having suspicions about LL. He intervened when he saw her alone in one of the rooms, but despite finding Child K deteriorating with LL by the incubator, he did not make any record of his suspicions.

Court adjourned for lunch and I have to go, so will catch up with the thread this evening. Thank you for the considered responses. It is a very hard read - I'm not sure anybody can follow it too closely for too long.

This is the problem with witness testimony, though. Witnesses are very prone to "revising" their memories when they receive new information. At this point everyone has known about the charges against LL for many years; there will be a strong tendency for people to inflate their own involvement and foresight by "remembering" that they always suspected her, and as PP posted, at least one person "remembers" her being there when something went wrong when someone else has testified that she was elsewhere at the time. It's likely that people working in the unit have "remembered" that LL was there in their statements at times that she wasn't on shift at all; the prosecution will have checked shift records and eliminated these statements, but this is why witness testimony can be very problematic.

For clarity: I have no view at present on whether LL did or did not commit the crimes of which she is accused. I do think the prosecution have an uphill battle to get to "beyond reasonable doubt" in these circumstances, and the evidence presented so far seems heavy on vague inference of general badness and light on specificity.

Surely as a professional ,if you were at all suspicious about a colleague you would raise your concerns patiticurly in such a high risk environment, if it was a matter of life and death ?

In what way did he supposedly intervene?

And why would you not mention it to someone higher up? Even discreetly?

Exactly it doesn't reflect well on him

Yes

The charges are all listed as separate, therefore the verdict will be given per charge

I still think this is a tough one. As I posted earlier:
Prove the deaths were intentional (without a PM in some cases and revising original clause of death) rather than 'natural' or negligent
Prove LL did this

This just supports the idea of a mismanaged department with a culture of fear, so everyone keeps their heads down. Plenty of departments like this in the NHS.