Lucy Letby: have you changed your mind - thread 3

[Typicalwave]

New thread for those following or wishing to comment - originally started by @kittybythelighthouse.

Thank you @Oftenaddled I shall take a look.

Hmm so I was right about them considering getting CCTV for the unit after all! Thanks to whoever posted the article. I've been going back through old threads from way before the trial on another site to try and find anything about that, and if LL had any opinion on that. I'm sure I remember she didn't want it. But I could be wrong.

If I do happen to find it (or anything else interesting) I'll post it. Also curious @Kittybythelighthouse you kept saying Chester was far from the worst regarding death rate? Do you have a source for that?

I think she’s innocent.

@Kittybythelighthouse - what do you know about this stated below? Trying to find alternative sources

I don’t think it’s very meaningful at the moment to say that there are more experts on the side of the defence than the prosecution - there has been no need for the prosecution to find any further experts to be on their side as she has been convicted.

I don’t think anyone disputed that it was possible the idea of CCTV had been floated - and the source I posted is just one of several that csn be found online. What I couldng find was any credible source of Letby objecting to this. None.

Having worked in a caring profession, I don't find it odd at all that she "stalked" the parents on social media. You spend some of the worst and best moments of their life together, caring for their relative/child and supporting the family. You start to love their relative/child as if they were your own.

It is natural to wonder how their family is doing after you lose the person/child you were caring for. I don't have Facebook and the like, but colleagues did and I know they looked up, and in cases were they were especially close to the resident, friended family members.

I enjoyed hearing from colleagues about how their families were doing. In a caring setting, people confide in you. You hear about aunts, uncles, siblings etc, so much that you come to know them even if you rarely meet them. It's nice to keep up with how they are doing. I have no doubt that if I did have social media, I would still, even years later, be occasionally searching the families of the residents I cared for.

True, but we can only deal with the information we've got. I don't think it makes much sense to say we don't have knowledgeable and articulate experts on the defence side, and I think the prosecution experts we've seen are not up to their standard at all.

Having worked in the healthcare field, this is true. It’s natural human curiosity. I wouldn’t call it stalking, that feels too extreme. I have people look me up on LinkedIn many times… multiple times… I wouldn’t call that stalking necessarily

The information about child D and the legal advice and representation is all accurate and online at Thirlwall.

What is more subjective is the idea that the hospital (or consultants, or police) accelerated action against Letby in direct response to this. I don't see how that could be evidenced.

@Kittybythelighthousemay have a different source for this, but in terms of which hospitals saw an increase in neonate deaths in 2015 compared to 2014 and putting the increases into context with all neonatal units across the NHS, see here

https://triedbystats.com/

@Kittybythelighthouse interesting because the article I found said it was the worst trust out of 43 similar size ones.

What is also of interest in that dynamic, though, is that children C, D, O and P were all to have coroner's inquests, that is, further investigation of deaths assumed natural and with deliberate harm, but not excluding medical negligence. These inquests were cancelled once the police investigation was opened. Child D, whose mother should have had antibiotics, and whose own antibiotic treatment was delayed, was due to have her inquest just days after the Chester consultants met the police and sparked the police inquiry in 2017.

I just expect anyone who followed the case to already know and corroborate this. I'd like to refresh my memory on it too-unfortunately most of the old stuff is lost among mountains of newer articles. I am going to give it a good look though. I'm SURE I remember a discussion about it at the time.

Not to put too fine a point on it - you say you closely followed the case frok the beginning. YIU yourself are this far unabl to find the supporting evidence for your claim.

Yes. Very lucky the hospital escaped further scrutiny from the coroner

Was that response meant for me? Regarding the states quoted on Triedbystats?

I've not properly looked yet. I'm going through my old posts on another site to see if it was discussed anywhere.

That's possible - it all depends how you are measuring things. So both articles can be correct. Are you adjusting to take into account babies' gestations? Are you including babies who are born elsewhere and transferred in? Or transferred out. Are you talking about the greatest spike or the highest raw number?

Three things matter here:

1. One hospital has to be worst performing, every year. Do we always assume there's a murderer?

1. If we are comparing like with like, i.e. each hospital is of similar quality with similar intake, we will still get random distributions of deaths. We can test to see whether the pattern can be explained by random distribution. David Spiegelhalter appeared at Thirlwall to say that this was certainly possible for Chester.

1. If we are aware of problems in a unit: lack of a single qualified neonatologist, understaffing, overcrowding, poor emergency training and technique etc, we should not be surprised to see that unit perform comparatively badly

Sorry everyone, I’m catching up on everything here. Thanks for making the new thread @Typicalwave!

@Firefly1987 I said it wasn’t the worst NHS neonatal death spike and it wasn’t. Sherwood Forest had a much worse spike within the 12 months of the COCH spike, as shown by the attached image. This is according to MBRRACE-UK data as further explained in the below article.

The important point is that the COCH 2015 spike wasn’t at all an extraordinary spike, beyond the fact that the NHS generally has been struggling extraordinarily with neonatal and maternity services being particularly affected.

The doctors assuming that this spike was statistically meaningful and right away trying to find a culprit (from amongst the nurses only for some reason) was the first statistical mistake in a catastrophic chain of statistical mistakes in this case.

archive.ph/S13QQ

To address this point about the parents being stalked on social media. That’s a tabloid claim and a prosecution allegation, but it’s not actually true. She made around 2300 total searches during that time. Only 31 were for parents involved with the indictments and not all of the parents were searched. Letby was, like many millennials, a bit of a social media addict and maybe a wee bit nosy. She searched pretty much everyone she met in normal life, people at salsa class, friends of friends etc. In that context looking up some of the parents to see how they’re doing is not really that extraordinary.

She spent many weeks with some of these families. None of them complained about her at the time. One set of parents wanted her to be godmother. You get interested in people. That’s human. Many nurses have said (even in these threads I believe) that they have done similar. It’s human nature. Maybe not advisable, possibly a GDPR breach, but not stalking by anyone’s fair measure.

Dewi Evans has been abandoned by pretty much everyone at this point as he’s clearly unhinged. I’m astonished that anyone is arguing that he’s reliable!

Exactly this.

What article? It’s definitely wrong going by MBRRACE-UK data as illustrated above.

You haven’t presented anything - that I’ve seen - showing what you claimed: that LL refused to agree to the installation of CCTV in the unit, so I’m a bit confused as to what you’re referring to.