New Lucy Letby details

[Mrsdoyler]

Did you see today in the news that LucyLetby originally failed her nursing training.

Reason: Lack of empathy

Cannot imagine the planet someone would have to be on to spout opinions on a case like this, without being familiar with the facts to even a minimal degree.

I was familiar with the 100 days thing, I just assumed you must be talking about something more significant since you kept bringing it up

i think everyone is forgetting that the deaths were investigated by the royal college of paediatricians (I think) by a neonatologist. The findings were that LL had done nothing wrong and were damming of the consultants. Not enough qualified consultants. Not doing enough rounds. Refusing to seek outside help or transfer babies quickly enough. If you read that report the doctors are the ones who came out looking bad. Hence why they pushed back and continued to push their narrative that LL did it.

The findings were that LL had done nothing

Not that simple at all.

And the report recommended further investigation, which wasn't done.

Father's day seems to ring a bell too. You don't think it's a bit odd that an extremely premature baby who has done so well to make it to 100 days then suddenly collapses? She was due immunisations too, something they wouldn't be doing if she was unwell.

Interesting BBC article today trailing a Letby documentary airing tomorrow.

It seems to me the authors of this article/creators of the doc find the criticisms of the evidence overblown - particularly in the insulin cases.

They do also mention a few things I find utterly irrelevant as proof of guilt or innocence, like her behaving oddly on the stand. But it’s a fairly balanced article, while still giving the impression that the authors basically think there’s nothing to see here.

I’ll be interested to see what the documentary has to say about baby C, which is the case I find impossible to justify from a prosecution standpoint. There may be further details about it as they’ve interviewed some people not previously interviewed. BBC article

It could be odd or not. I’m not a doctor and there are differences of opinion among doctors who’ve spoken on this as to how unexpected or otherwise each baby’s collapse really was.

I think claiming 100 days is such a significant milestone that it can’t just be a coincidence is absolutely bonkers though. If you’re going that broad with milestones you could find one for literally any day of the year.

A lot of things are odd. In this case what should matter is evidence that the babies were murdered and evidence that Letby did it.
Isn’t this odd?

Lucy Letby (LL) to have murdered the children all of these things have to be true:

1. LL switched murder techniques and researched them all having left no trace of having done such research;
2. literally all of the initial post mortem causes of death (natural causes or unexplained) missed the murders;
3. LL has the most normal psychological profile of any serial killer ever known – no known background of cruelty to animals, antisocial tendencies, anything;
4. LL’s care of patients aroused zero suspicion through her years of training and practice, the first suspicion arose due to her presence in and around a few deaths or near-deaths, nothing anyone had seen in her actual care of patients;
5. LL committed the murders despite none of her colleagues directly observing her doing so;
6. LL faked her expressions of sadness at the babies’ deaths to families and colleagues.

There was a very interesting

Sorry my browser is playing up, I was trying to post the link to yesterday’s Guardian article about Daniela Poggiali.

LL’s care of patients aroused zero suspicion through her years of training and practice, the first suspicion arose due to her presence in and around a few deaths or near-deaths, nothing anyone had seen in her actual care of patients;

Not been following the enquiry then.

On 1. She was a qualified nurse. She attended specialist training on administering IV and ng feeds which covered the risks of air embolism. The conviction of Victorino Chua in Liverpool for murdering patients with insulin took place about three weeks before her first patient was poisoned with insulin. How much additional research did she need to do? Especially given her daily access to perform them and their relative simplicity - you do not need to know anything about dosing to give a neonate a lethal dose of insulin.

1. That is consistent with the methods chosen. However, by the time of babies O and P the consultants were demanding an inquest and we know now from the Thirlwall Inquiry the mothers of baby C and babies E and F wanted the coroner to open inquests in these cases - they knew nothing of each other or of the hospital suspicions they jyst could not understand the cause of deaths.
2. We don't know that. We only know no witnesses have said she experienced abuse which is the case for many violent male offenders with Antisocial personality disorder. But no one thinks she has ASPD. She may have a personality disorder and may have experienced childhood emotional abuse - certainly the levels of over involvement and control her parents showed in her adult life, attending grievance meetings at work and writing letters to her workplace prior to her return to work are concerning and raise questions about her emotional development.
3. Yes the Thirlwall Inquiry has already heard evidence she failed her final placement as a student nurse and after qualification on one occasion administered a tenfold dose of morphine to a baby and on another gave antibiotics to a baby who had not been prescribed them. There were lots of questions about her competence.
4. Assuming she deliberately killed or attempted to kill her victims it's likely she tried to conceal her actions in front of colleagues. Murderers tend to do this and as each nurse was assigned one baby and worked alone in dimly lit spaces she had good opportunities act deceptively.
5. Again yes she was either attempting to conceal her actions or motivation was the arousal she got from a baby dying and that being an event on the ward, she could act sympathetically and also receive sympathy from colleagues. Which sounds far fetched but is pretty consistent with a number of other serial killer nurses including Beverly Allitt whom she closely resembles and who has confessed to her crimes

LL has the most normal psychological profile of any serial killer ever known – no known background of cruelty to animals, antisocial tendencies, anything;

What credible person has studied that in detail and presented a peer reviewed, in depth thesis?

And she doesn't have a normal profile;
She failed to qualify first time due to a lack empathy.
Her behaviour made colleagues and families uncomfortable.
A father reported her encouraging them to move their baby into a ventilated crib for deceased infants, before they'd even passed away.
The way she spoke about, in person and by text, babies' collapses and deaths was seen as very strange by several colleagues.
She involved her father in her professional/work place issues,
she "collects paper" by taking home, illegally, hundreds of patient documents (some of them apparently pulled out of bins) and keeps them; while shedding her bank documents. She looks up families of tragically lost babies at the times when they would expressing their grief and loss etc etc etc.

How the fuck does she have a normal psychological profile? The inquiry is filling out flesh on the bones of her character, and none of it is positive.

Not only that Dr Hawdon found suboptimal care in 13 of 17 cases and found that some babies may have survived with different treatment. She also noted problems with clinical management. She passed 4 cases to Dr McPartland, pathologist, for review who confirmed natural causes, and in the case of Baby A ruled our air embolism.

It is clear how much of an outlier COCH nnu was. Consultant ward rounds were twice a week. The norm is twice a day. Junior doctors were left unsupervised, repeatedly failing at procedures like intubation that should be simple and did not cause problems in nearby units at Alder Hey and Arrowe Park.

There are 3 recorded cases of negligence: Noah Robinson, an unnamed case that resulted in an 8.5 million payout, and later, Olly Stopforth.

Babies were left without fluids or glucose, on a far too high level of CPAP (dangerous and a potential cause of air embolism), key indicators like raised lactate not acted on.

The insistence on the babies being stable is not supported by the objective evidence. It tells us one of two things (or maybe a bit of both): the staff lacked the competence to identify a sick neonate, or the staff realise they f**ked up but are trying to cover.

Nothing has shown suspicions at the time. Two episodes of incompetence didn’t arouse suspicions.
Her failed placement confirms she could be awkward around parents - really nothing significant at the time in terms of predicting crimes.

What is it you think is behavior that arouses suspicions? There's either the subtle stuff like saying inappropriate things like 'i want to get my first death out of the way' which Letby did. There the sinister stuff like administering a fatal overdose which was thankfully detected before it caused harm and was attributed to error. Or there's actual bodies. We have all three. Obviously with hindsight it would have been better if she had been stopped between acting suspiciously and murdering but at a certain level of suspicion people would have stopped her practicing - indeed her final placement mentor would not sign off her competencies. What other behaviors do you think she should have displayed before murdering people to let people know she intended to murder people but not in such an obviously specific way they would prevent her murdering people? Because it's clear people found her behavior pretty worrying

The crux of the matter is that whether a case so complex, with so much uncertainty and high profile controversy surrounding it should have resulted in 15 whole life terms, in my opinion. And whether cases of this nature are properly served by the justice system. Having experienced similar but not as serious because no death occurred, it does concern me because false accusations of such heinous crimes have a harmful impact too.

We can't have a system by which innocent people are jailed or penalised on other life changing ways and it's considered ok because "most" people are guilty, without a fairer apoeals process. At least we don't have the death penalty apparently to many people's chagrin which can be regarded as a small mercy depending on one's perspective.

I've asked before, bit it's never been answered - how do you think you'd react or behave if you were innocent yet convicted on circumstantial evidence that was difficult to disprove? Do you really think you'd happily just "take one for the justice system team" ?

Absolutely and that is the job of the Thirwall enquiry.

Not to prove her guilt ( though it absolutely is). It is to see where she could have been stopped.

No. It’s not at all clear that people found her behaviour pretty worrying.
Back later.

And to presumably establish that these poor wee souls were actually murdered

@HazelPlayer

The consultants had a professional obligation to go to the coroner and the CDOP if they were concerned about the death - management are not needed for that. The narrative that management prevented them contacting police is bogus, there are senior police on the CDOP.

The management merely told them correctly that you cannot accuse a person of murder on the basis of shift data with no other evidence. J has himself admitted they had no other evidence.

Management was happy to go support investigation and the RCPCH and Drs Hawdon and McP were called in for clinical review. But the consultants couldn’t accept their findings and chose to pursue LL instead.

The consultants were very aware that, as one said in an email: “until this is resolved we are all under suspicion”.

In 2017/8 some parents hired negligence lawyers Slater and Gordon who were circling.

The Thirlwall has revealed that the COCH brought a QC/KC in to advise them if they could be sued for negligence wrt Baby D. Neither mother or child had been given antibiotics they should have been and Baby D died. The QC said from the evidence that it was 'indefensible' that antibiotics were not given when clear infection was found.

At this point the consultants went to the police and coroner’s report was shelved.

It’s hard to understand why you persist in denying the targeting of LL when she had a grievance upheld on that very matter and the consultants were required to apologise to her.

As to the rest of your post you have merely misrepresented a quick outline I made to a poster on the subject of “conspiracy.”

I simply explained that this case represents a systems failure not a grand conspiracy, which is typical of other miscarriages of justice.

Once the consultants had contacted police with their claims, the police didn’t have the medical knowledge to gainsay them. The wildly unreliable Dewi Evans presented himself content to support the consultants’ claims and to find poor quality evidence to support them. And the CPS proceeded to prosecution on those terms.

Which is why medics like Phil Hammond and Michael Hall are rightly calling for reform of the system. Hammond has pointed out that proper scientific scrutiny of the medical data before trial would have weeded out the worst of the junk science. Had this happened, the case would have been much smaller if it had been brought at all.

@Grahamhousehushand

Talk to any trainee medical professional and they will tell you their first experience of deaths were daunting and affecting.

LL did not administer a fatal overdose. She and a more senior nurse were responsible for setting a morphine infusion at 1.32 millilitres per hour rather than the correct amount of 0.13 millilitres per hour. Which is 10 times too fast, rather than 10 times too much. LL was the junior nurse and the other, more senior, had equal if not more responsibility for the mistake.

I'm not sure you really got what I was saying. It is less about where she could have been stopped, more about the appalling state of the unit.

I am a medical professional, married to a medical professional, daughter of two medical professionals, sister of a medical professional.

Your second point makes no sense. Presumably it was continuous infusion as that's standard so the effect wd be identical. There is no other way of overdosing via infusion than by increasing the rate of infusion. I cannot understand your point. It may have been an error. But it is notable the other nurse offered to resign over it. Errors with infusions are common as each drug and px needs to be calculated specifically, they have happened to me as a px. Thankfully we have a lot of fail-safes in the system, in this case it was that the drug was double-checked at handover. What makes this unusual is that it was morphine in a preterm infant - hence the senior nurse's reaction as I don't know if it's technically a never event but it must be close.

The pump was set to deliver the infusion at 1.32ml per hour instead of 0.13ml per hour, that means the drug would have gone through 10 times quicker than it should. It should have been checked and signed for by both nurses at every stage, including setting the pump rate of infusion per hour, I thought it was the next handover shift nurse that noticed the error and not the 2 who set it up, an overdose in a infusion can also occur if too much drug was added in the first place, ie 10mg instead of 1mg.