Thirlwall Inquiry/Lucy Letby

[PrettyFlyforaMaiTai]

Is anyone following? There have been so astonishing revelations about how Letby was able to harm/murder babies for so long without being stopped.

Some interesting details so far:

• They have discovered through an audit that whilst on placements in Liverpool Women’s Hospital (Oct-Dec 12/Jan-Feb 15) dislodgement of endotracheal tubes occurred in 40% of shifts she worked. Usually it is found in less than 1% of shifts
• The Doctor she was allegedly involved with took her on supervised visits to Alder Hey Children’s Hospital during investigation
• She returned to the Unit at least once during the investigation (Feb 2017)
• Junior Doctors referred to her as Nurse Death at the time
• Letby sent an email to all staff on the neonatal unit saying she had been exonerated from accusations from medical staff. However, no one involved emailed to correct her that she hadn’t even been investigated yet, never mind exonerated
• Doctors who continued with their concerns were threatened with disciplinary action and were made to understand that mediation was compulsory. When one Doctor stated he felt uncomfortable the mediator stated that it was actually voluntary

I think this inquiry is going to reveal a lot more about her. I had multiple arguments with others on a previous thread about her - I have never seen a case where people have been so keen to exonerate a convicted serial killer. People picking one small piece of the huge amount of evidence against her and saying “yeah but it could be natural causes”. Well, yes but taken together with all the other evidence and the fact that this kept happening to her, it is very unlikely to be natural causes.

And on this thread, people are already trying to excuse/explain the massive increase in incidents during her time at LWH.

True and tbf I think the nurse death term was used after she had been suspended from clinical duties. Or was it before that?
Interestingly in the Ben Geen case, his colleagues nicknamed him Ben Allitt due to his constant presence during collapses.
I do think colleague nicknames can be indicative of some underlying truth though. Wasn’t Wayne Couzens nicknamed “the rapist” at work?

The 40% is a very misleading way to prevent statistics.

endo tubes dislodge 1% of the time they say. So if there is 1000 days of babies being on tubes, then that is 10 dislodgements.

Lucy being present 40% of the time means she was on shift for 4 dislodgement. That’s what that means. Not that dislodgement increased to 40% when she was there.

There is 168 hours in a week. Say she was doing 60 hours a week as she was really keen on being a nurse and loved her job.

60 hours out of 168 is 36%. So she is there for 36% of the week, so being there for 40% of the dislodgements isn’t that baffling. I bet if you looked at other nurses working 60+ hour weeks they would be present for that many too.

The OP said 1% of shifts, not one per cent of babies. So on any given shift or 6 hour period, there’s a 1 % chance that the tube of one baby will become dislodged. So it’s a rare event but it happened on four out of every ten shifts she worked.

I think some people are just so convinced she’s innocent that they will challenge absolutely everything.

Assuming there's more than one baby on the ward, how often a single baby extubates doesn't tell us how often these events happen.

Also, that 1% is on the very low end - so until we hear about frequency at Liverpool at that time, and not "generally", we have no information to go on.

The point is that extubation is usually a rare event. You wouldn’t expect it to happen often at all. It was happening on 40% of the shifts that Lucy worked. Basically a usually very uncommon thing seemed to be commonplace when she was around. Same as the unexpected collapses at the Countess of Chester.
Odd how bad luck seems to follow her around.

I read this today and found it very helpful and brilliantly written: https://unherd.com/2024/09/forget-what-you-know-about-lucy-letby/
May the truth can come out and justice be served 🙏

I agree these figures are all meaningless without context. My dh is a hospital consultant, he has been involved in numerous clinical trails and many pieces of research, so he's extremely good at interpreting data. When he heard those the way those figures were given he actually shouted "meaningless" at the TV 😁

His view on Letby's trial was that we can't possibly know if she's guilty or not, but that the evidence did not seem compelling enough to be beyond all reasonable doubt. He was convinced there would not be a conviction - he was gobsmacked.

Extubation of one child is a quite rare event - but once a month would be well within normal range in an NICU.

Extubation of one of several children on a ward is therefore not particularly rare. Four on ventilators? Now it's once a week.

Particular children are prone to extubation, and repeated extubation. So you can get a run of these events across a few days.

The data as presented is meaningless.

What would you say about a woman who had two babies die of cot deaths? A cot death is statistically rare, so there must be something suspicious about two?

If you understand statistics you can calculate the probability of two cot deaths occurring with the same mother in a population of 67 million people. But cot deaths aren't just by chance. There could be a genetic predisposition. Or the mother might quite innocently been doing something that increased the risk. No one seems to want to think it might have been the father.

You can't convict someone just because of coincidence.

Didn't take long for the Lucy Letby murderer sympathisers to arrive I see.

No and for the millionth time she was not convicted based on coincidence. She was convicted based on expert evidence that the babies died unnatural deaths (even if many armchair-medics disagree with their opinions). She was also convicted on the basis of various other evidence, which included being there for every event, hoarding medical notes at home, behaving oddly, falsifying notes, insisting on being in particular rooms with sick babies when assigned elsewhere etc.

The unexpected deaths stopped when she was moved off the ward. Many will point to the downgrade meaning they didn’t take babies under 32 weeks. Most of Lucy’s victims were born over 32 weeks so this isn’t a credible explanation- they would have been there even after the downgrade. The majority of the ones she killed were expected to survive and thrive.

It’s quite sick. What’s next? How Harold Shipman was wrongly targeted because the huge spike in deaths among his patients while he was present “tells us nothing”? Should we pardon him posthumously?

Quite. People used to refer to him as Dr death as well. No doubt it was all bullying and how dare it be suggested that he actually murdered hundreds of people rather than the 15 he was convicted of. All statistics after all.

Nobody's questioning Shipman's conviction.

Nobody's sympathizing with a murder.

Data presented is either useful to indicate a given point of not. The data about extubations is not a useful indicator of Letby's activities or guilt. That's the case whether or not she murdered anyone.

Plenty of people are sympathising with a murderer.The last thread was full of people accusing posters of not having empathy for her because of how difficult it must have been for her to stand trial. So it is completely disingenuous to say that people aren't sympathising with her. They absolutely are.

Well, it is relevant to the inquiry which relates to her employment as a nurse and whether people should have intervened earlier or spotted any problems. So they need to highlight any potential problems that did exist and decide whether the hospital was negligent in not taking action. A much higher than expected incidence of an event that is otherwise very rare is without a question something that needs to be flagged as it does suggest a problem, especially in hindsight now that she has been convicted of multiple child murders. My impression is that some posters will reject every single suggestion that LL's behaviour was a concern, claiming it shows nothing of relevance.

And Shipman was reported because he had a much higher than expected death rate and he happened to be present for most of them too. There was obviously lots of other circumstantial evidence against him too, eg the forged will. There was plenty of circumstantial evidence against Lucy too, hence the convictions by two separate juries and the rejection of her appeal by the Court of Appeal.

Agree. There were posts talking about the massive pressure she was under, how her behaviour in stealing medical notes was totally normal, how she was a victim of workplace bullying, how she was a whistleblower. It went on and on and on.

They've yet to present any data showing that Letby had a higher incidence of extubations than anyone else, even before considering whether that would be significant.

I'm really not familiar with Shipman's case.

She was under pressure, and she was a victim of workplace bullying.

You can recognize that and still see that it doesn't mean she wasn't also a murderer.

Well, they are giving their opening statements to the inquiry so no, that wouldn't include any forensic examination of data. That will come later on. I would assume though that they haven't plucked these figures out of their arses and that she actually did have a much higher than expected rate of extubations during her shifts compared to the patterns when she was not on shift.
I think some people seem to assume that the lawyers involved in LL's case and the inquiry are morons who just bumble their way through, making up meaningless figures, or not knowing that they can call rebuttal evidence if they have any. That's really not the case.

Raising well founded suspicions about your colleague murdering patients and pushing for them to be taken off the ward is not bullying. There is no evidence that the doctors targeted her in any way before they became suspicious. Why would they just randomly pick on her? They explained why they were concerned. That's not bullying.

She was under as much pressure as any defendant in a murder trial would be. I am sure the process is a very stressful one.

If the KC had said what you've said, it would have been a meaningful statement, yes. I don't know why he didn't make a clearer statement, if that's what he meant.

No, those things aren't bullying. Gossiping about Nurse Death in the canteen is bullying.

I believe that was after she had already been accused of killing patients though and been removed from clinical duties (in September 2016 I think). I’d be surprised if there were any workplaces where that wouldn’t generate gossip.