Dr Ravi Jayoram on Facebook -
Many of you are aware that due to the Lucy Letby trial, I have mostly been absent from social media over the last few months.
My heart goes out to the families of the babies affected by this although nothing can ever undo the evil that was inflicted on their children.
My colleagues and I have lived this for the last 8 years and the period of the trial has been the most difficult part of this. I am proud of all the frontline colleagues with whom I work, for managing to carry on providing excellent care to babies and children under such pressure.
There are bad people in all walks of life and many of them are very good at hiding in plain sight. There are also people in highly paid positions of responsibility in healthcare whose job it is to ensure patient safety. I am relieved that the often-maligned criminal justice system has worked properly this time. However, there are things that need to come out about why it took several months from concerns being raised to the top brass before any action was taken to protect babies, and why from that time it then took almost a year for those highly paid senior managers to allow the police to be involved.
The truth of what happened during that time will shock you to the core as it comes out. The safety of patients should come above any risk of reputational damage and sometimes the right decisions might be difficult and unpopular, but executive level managers are paid to do just that. There are people out there now, still earning six figure sums of tax-payers money or retired with their gold-plated pensions, who need to stand up in public to explain why they did not want to listen and do the right thing, to acknowledge that their actions potentially facilitated a mass-murderer and to apologise to the families involved in all of this. However, I suspect the response will be fudge and misinformation and it is now my mission moving forwards to make sure that they are held to account.
There is a long history of whistleblowers who raise concerns in the NHS not only being ignored but then being portrayed as the problem, sometimes to the point of their careers being destroyed. What happened here was history repeating itself but the patient safety issue that was ignored was beyond anything that the NHS has tried previously to cover up. There needs to be fundamental change in the culture and governance of NHS institutions and it should start right now.