Lucy Letby. Why do some people only read headlines?

[skyfirechesnut]

I was at work today and someone says so Lucy letby is innocent now. They have just gone with the media headlines. Instead of researching.

Sorry for the fail link but this is quite a good article below on the current state of things. The author has attended all trials and listened to appeals and conferences.

I also don't understand people who say she was scapegoated. If people follow the Thirwall enquiry this is far from the case. She was totally protected, her parents calling up, being in meetings, dictating apologies. It beggars belief.

I can somewhat understand people saying she is innocent based on medical evidence after the press conference but even that is nothing new.

You can't say my expert is better than yours.

Also people seem to think it was all Dewi Evans for the prosecution it wasn't. There was Dr Bohin, Prof Arthurs , Prof Hindnarsh and Dr Mar etc.

That is without the Doctor colleagues if you want to dispute them.

Then they new defence have changed ideas from the conference they had in December.

They are also not totally impartial.
It isn't as simple as the headlines.

Here is the article.

archive.ph/NYg7U

Astonishing projection here from you!

You are the one dismissing facts and tying yourself in knots.That is YOU.

Please name one single fact that we have dismissed. Please do explain. Present just one knot we have tied ourselves in. Or five? Or ten? Or 187? I’ll wait. Go on.

You won’t win.

This is a fair enough response for someone who hasn’t really engaged with it. You sound reasonable. You’re obviously not an idiot. I expect once you start digging even slightly you’ll be very upset very quickly.

I really do need a justification for this mad comment. At this point you literally are the conspiracy theorists. It’s bananas and it’s crazy that you can’t see it.

Explain yourself. Come on! Use facts and sources. Don’t be shy. As my granny used to say, either piss or get off the pot. The floor is yours 🙂

I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere but has anyone listened to the, "Was Here Ever A Crime" podcast? It's hosted by John Sweeney, a former Observer journalist, and Edward Abel Smith who I think is an author. There are just eight episodes and an interview with Dewi Evans.

In one of the episodes they talk about Dr B (one of the 4 Consultants) was responsible for the death of a baby in 2015 because they ignored all the evidence that an ET tube was in the oesophagus rather than the trachea, evidence which included an x-ray!

I've linked to the first episode.

True - it's not all about the headlines. But it's also very much NOT about reading one article from one (biased) source!

Concerbing dislodgemenrs BOTH my prem twins would duslodge their feeding tubes themselves and regularly. I called the nurse as i watched them do so, wedging their tiny little pinky in the tiny gap between the edge of their nose and the bit the tape couldnt cover without covering their nostril.

I read something about this the other day. I’ll see if I can find it again, but they only looked at hers . They weren’t comparing her rate with the rest of the unit during a timeframe, they were comparing it with an expected average, so again it was very much poor statistics presented in a misleading way.

That would be interesring. Some things can be a matter of perspective and how things are presentes. As i worked on NICU ward as a student, i never came across any babies dislodging their tubes. However i cant believe my twi s were the only ones ro ever do this. They were however 34 weeks gestation, so perhqps it may not be so possuble for an earlier prem baby. However if my twuns were under one nurse the nu.ber of dislodgements if you count the qctual number of dislodgements as oposed to the number of babies on the ward would be through the roof.
Therefore i think its important to appreciate where statistics fail to reflect the real world situations.

Here is a post I made earlier @PinkTonic and @twinklystar23 . You are right that some babies are just fidgety with the tubes - nobody's fault.

Here's the story of the 40%

At the opening of the Thirlwall Enquiry, lawyer Steve Baker claimed that dislodgements occured on 40% of Letby's shifts as opposed to 1% for other nurses.

This was met with great excitement in the press and widespread derision by medics and statisticians.

Why? It's an impossible measure, badly expressed.

If dislodgements took place on 14 of Letby's 34 shifts and there was for some reason only one baby in the large level 3 care unit, that would be odd. Still perfectly possible if that one baby was a serial dislodger or if the doctors (not nurses) on duty were bad at inserting tubes, or if nurses and parents were bad at handling babies with tubes ...

But of course there was more than one baby on the ward. There were on average 40.
Let's imagine that 30 of them were intubated in this setting. There should be a dislodgement about one shift in three, even with that 1% rate, which is very low. That would cover Letby's numbers. (In practice the same babies tend to dislodge repeatedly, so you could easily just be on for a week with a wriggly baby)

Nobody ever compared what happened during Letby's shifts at Liverpool with what happened at anybody else's shifts. They just looked at hers alone.

This statistic is like expecting somebody who owns one convenience store to have the same turnover as someone who owns forty convenience stores.

Jane Hutton, a Professor in statistics from Warwick wrote to Baker. She explained the problem and that he was in danger of misleading the public. She offered to help him to explain the statistics properly.
When Baker mentioned this statistic first, he said he would give details later. He never mentioned it again after receiving Hutton's letter. He never explained it.

If you could lock nurses up for something like this - no eyewitnesses, no comparison with other nurses on the same unit, no suspicions at the time over ten years ago - nurses everywhere should be very very afraid.

One of the problems with the way they are handling Letby's shifts at Liverpool is that they are looking at them in isolation. They have no eyewitness accounts of any problem. Nobody had or suspected any problem at the time. So what are they doing?

They did an audit of her shifts alone. Now imagine you do this for a fairly small number of any nurse's shifts. Remember she's not looking after any particular baby so the numbers are for all of them.

Were there more desats than usual? Maybe not.

Were there more hypos than usual? Maybe not.

Were there more resuscitations than usual? Maybe not.

Was there more vomiting than usual? Maybe not.

Were there more crying fits than usual? Maybe not.

Were there ... and on and on and on until you hit one. The way events are distributed, you will find something different in any set of shifts.

It's worth being aware that she was a trainee. Staff at Liverpool have said that while it is not absolutely impossible she would be unobserved with a baby briefly, it's not likely. So 14 times?

It is not rational.

This is an extraordinary tirade. Exactly how have I tied myself in any knots? What outlandish claims have I made? Be specific please.

In relation to your four methods of killing

Air

The suggestion of air injection has been discredited. The paper used to support the theory didn’t say what Evans said it said.

The suggestion of air splinting the diaphragm was always manifest bollocks and even Evans himself withdrew that.

Insulin

The test used to determine whether the high levels of insulin in the babies’ bodies was exogenous are not capable of determining the levels. This is a fact.

Overfeeding

I don’t believe anyone has explained how overfeeding causes death. Can you provide a link please.

Morphine

We’ve already been over this one and you have twisted my explanation, either because you are not arguing in good faith or because you don’t understand anything about medicines administration.

Do you not understand the concept of presumption of innocence?

Thank you, I knew I read a great explanation somewhere!

Sorry that’s to @Oftenaddled

I think the issue of "tube" dislodgements was in relation to ET (breathing) tubes, not OG/NG (feeding) tubes.

Thing is, if you Google breathing tubes for neonates, there seem to be a variety going by the images. The devil is very much in the detail here, and we don't have any detail. Nor do we know how often Lucy Letby was alone with the babies when the alleged dislodgements happened. Just saying dislodgements happened when she was on shift isn't enough - not without specifics. Also, if this was the case and noticed at the time while she was training, why wasn't it addressed?

Yes I think that is correct.

Yes, that's right - ET tubes, and they're the type I'm referring to in the stats and accompanying remarks.

Dislodging an NG tube would be much harder if possible at all and a bit pointless for anyone trying to harm children.

Ng tubes are actually very easy to dislodge. As a PP said, babies can hook their fingers under the unsecured part at their nose and pull them out. Not a huge risk, although if it's far enough out and sitting over the trachea there's a risk of aspiration

Okay, something I have misunderstood there then but we are definitely referring to ET tubes anyway for the spurious 40% stat.

I should probably have said extubate rather than dislodge, thinking about it!

It seems quite conclusive that there was no crime - so when you take away the crime, all the other ‘evidence’ of the notes, her behaviour, the fb searches and the diary entries are irrelevant.

again I’m yet to see any eminently qualified person come out since that press conference and agree with Dewi Evans. Maybe during the trial there was, I don’t know. But currently we have the pathologist who did the autopsies saying no crime, this super expert panel saying no crime and one long retired paediatrician who inserted himself into the case saying there was a crime. If someone can give me some medical people who have stood up and agree with Dewi I’d love to hear it. But I haven’t seen a single one.

There were other expert witnesses for the prosecution.

Have any of them come out to defend the Evans theories since the press conference? If not I wonder why?

I can tell you what they’ll say.

Handover sheets as trophies
Facebook searches
Falsified medical documents
Caught red handed by a doctor
Made parents uncomfortable
Failed her placement due to lack of empathy
Wrote a confession note
Seemed cold at the trial

Of course all those things either have obvious innocent explanations, did not happen in the way they’re presented, or both.

It’s impossible at this stage to be as invested in the case as that poster is and not know that, for example, the “falsified medical documents” just relate to a common practice among nurses of adding information later on, and a possible misrecording of a time due to daylight savings.

It’s impossible to have an ounce of common sense or imagination and think that facebook searching a large chunk of people you meet, among them the families of patients, is even unusual, never mind indicative of murder.

But point any of this out and you are “tying yourself in knots”.

Have any of them come out to defend the Evans theories since the press conference? If not I wonder why?

@MistressoftheDarkSide I have no idea, they may way well already be in touch with the prosecution in relation to their responses. However, as the press conference was a completely unprofessional way for Mark Macdonald (in conjunction with LL's PR firm!) to go about things, I would not be expecting any of them sink to the same level and put their responses into the public arena outside of a judicial process.

Sorry my post above was in response to @Kittybythelighthouse asking @Firefly1987 what facts she’s talking about.

What troubles me most about this case is how incredibly ordinary LL is. She honestly has NOTHING strange or interesting about her, and yet people will swear blind her behaviour is so out there she just has to be a murderer. It terrifies me. It’s not even that any minor deviation from the norm is demonised - she IS the norm. What does this mean for anyone with the slightest quirk?

Guarantee if any of our lives were turned over to the extent hers has been they’d almost certainly find more unusual behaviour and moral failings than they found with her.

Whether the press conference was unprofessional has no bearing on the actual fact of her guilt or innocence.

We have such a lot of petty bureaucrats here hung up on points of process. If there’s strong evidence this could be a miscarriage of justice, what does it matter if her lawyer tapdanced naked across Leicester Square to announce that?