Lucy Letby guilty

[BarelyLiterate]

Lucy Letby has been convicted of the murder of seven babies and the attempted murder of six more.

My thoughts are with the families of the victims.

One of the biggest problems in this saga being allowed to build up to so many deaths wasn't just the sheer quantity, which was huge, it was that the cause of death was wrongly assigned in several cases. I guess hindsight is an amazing thing, but it seems quite dubious when the deaths were so unexpected and startling enough to make the consultants complain that they were not investigated more fully at the time, in terms of their causality, and that only happened later on.

I haven't worked on a ward for many years, but when I did (adult ward) the insulins were kept in the fridge, so you could just draw up and administer the insulin as the doctor had prescribed. There was no log or record. I'm not sure if that's different these days. The only meds locked up were morphine based meds etc. They would need 2 nurses to sign out.

I think Cheshire Police did very well, Such a shame they weren't alerted sooner.

I can't imagine what those poor consultants felt. Apparently they desperately tried to say if she goes back on the ward we must have cc tv.

I know what it's like to feel trapped within the management systems.

There is no way to give anonymous feedback.
I wonder what the bosses are doing now.
I'd like to know their rationale re trying to scares the consultants by there being lots of blue tape over investigation into potential murder?

It was the absolute certainty of her friend which wound me up too. The friend didn’t even go to any of the trial as Lucy told all her friends not to attend.

Go and look up the nhs scandals in the last 20 years. It's always the same story. Managers ignore safety reports, they treat clinicians with contempt. Try whistleblowing in the NHS, you'll get ostracised and bullied out.

This, just this, seen it many a time. Clinicians of all professions raise concerns and are ostracised for it, get reported to their professional bodies, lost their job, their home, their families and sometimes even their life through suicide.

I have also seen consultants a couple of times take a dislike to another HCP like a nurse or an AHP and drive them out of their job by constant criticism and demeaning comments as they just want to get away from the constraints treatment of them, but there instances are by far outweighed by the manager's incompetence.

This whole sorry episode makes me so sad. I'm a clinician and a manager (not not a senior one!), like most managers in the nhs I'm a clinical manager. I and my peers come into work to do the best job we can, under trying circumstances most of them time. I used to love working for the nhs, now it's a slog for the usual reasons of not enough staff/ working equipment and too many patients to cope with, I'd like to work in a place which doesn't have literal crumbling walls, broken equipment, supportive manager/ peers/ juniors so that I can give the patient the patient focused care that I can.

It wasn't just insulin, she injected them with air and milk

This. Totally this.

Furthermore, if Lucy was a person of colour she never would have got away with doing so much harm.

Those poor poor babies

The Panorama programme was obviously set up to be completed as soon as the verdict was announced. But most of it was filmed and recorded previously.

You need to be clear that her friends were defending her before she was found guilty. There is no arrogance in it at all. It's a perfectly normal reaction of a friend who can't believe someone she thought was one kind of person is actually a completely different person.

There were people on here analysing all the evidence and claiming that Letby was set up to protect consultants or the hospital. Presumably that's what her friends told themselves had happened.

Now she's been found guilty, her friends will be in shock and having to come to terms with the fact that she was so far from what she had seemed to be for all those years. It would be very wrong to blame them for something that even her colleagues found almost unbelievable - "Not nice Lucy?"

Lucy deserves everything she gets, but I hope other people don't come to the same ignorant conclusion that you have and start persecuting someone whose only crime was to stick up for a friend like any of us might do.

I got the impression that the friend was interviewed several months ago during the earlier part of the trial. I struggle to believe someone could do this and I don't know her. I can fully see why her friend thought she was innocent based on knowing her over many years. She may be feeling very different today.

Check out what happened to Hadiza Bawa-Garba when managers scapegoated her and referred her to the GMC.

I think also Lucy asked her friends to stay away from the trial so they may not have heard all the evidence

@WhisperingHi It's not the court's job to make sure that a random member of the public is convinced of someone's innocence or guilt based on what they have read/vaguely understood about the case and evidence.

Investigated them. Which is unbelievably stressful.

Sorry, that was a reply to question about what the GMC would have done.

Frankly the number of people on here who seem to think they know better than the jury of 12 people who have sat through months of evidence, weighed and considered that very carefully and returned a guilty verdict is astounding.

Besides even if the consultants had directly approached the police (and as paediatric consultants they probably have more contact/familiarity with the police than most consultants due to child protection medical etc) what would have happened? The police would have been told by the managers that there was no evidence of any wrong doing etc and it was a group of doctors trying to bully a nurse/had already been dealt with and investigated in house. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere and just have painted a massive target on the doctor’s backs.

This always happens on jury related threads. Frustrating

The jurors on this case should be commanded, I hope they have professional support after sitting in on this trial. I did jury service before and cannot imagine the impact such a disturbing and long trial must have had on them. Hats off to them.

Beverly Allitt seems equally sinister, just caught faster -- "Allitt had attacked thirteen children, four fatally, over a 59 day period before she was brought up on charges for her crimes."

Well, yes you do know that she’s done it, because she’s been found guilty in a court of law following a trial lasting 10 months in which extensive evidence was heard. And it took the jury 110 hours to reach their decisions. It has been properly weighed up, and she has done it. I mean comments like this are fucking nuts.

It didn't go unnoticed.
At least one doctor raised serious concerns.
He was brushed off.

Yes! We didn't hear every single peice of evidence, see the body language, hear all the legal arguments etc. They decided for some charges there wasn't enough evidence so its not like they just sat there and went yeah...she's guilty of it all job done let's go home. They clearly took it incredibly seriously and I hope they are offered counselling.

Think you’ve answered your own question. If every drug was controlled and had to be checked and signed for by two members of staff. Plus count every single tablet or mm of liquid in the drug’s cupboard we’d never get any other work done. Or we’d need double the staff.

99.9% of nurses are not murdering patients. Thankfully it’s very rare.

Though typing this I’m just reminded of the doctor down Portsmouth/Southampton way who was suspected of murdering patients. There was a tv expose about her but she’s never been charged and that’s gone quiet.