Lucy Letby

[kkloo]

New thread as the last one has filled up.

Oops cross posted there.

I know, the shockingly sub standard care mothers have recently described in the maternity ward, followed by so little understanding of the needs of premature babies plus poor conditions and low staffing can't possibly have contributed to this debacle.... 🙄

Thank you I’m all good, but there’s a lot of pulling and rummaging that goes on, they don’t just pop out. The youngest had her own baby in December and he went to NICU as he was 5 weeks early. He’s an absolute delight, but that 3 week stay was an eye opener for sure.

Yep, I've lost count of the mistakes that the hospital made and things that they have missed in the care of mothers and babies, and that's even before all of this has even been fully investigated so we still don't know the full horrifying extent of it.

They do appear to have been remarkably unlucky. Every time you turn round there seems to be another incredibly rare incident that seems to exonerate Letby. Except that none of it ever actually does.

And the more of this stuff that gets flung around, the more I suspect that if/when the CCRC decide against referring to appellate court there will be a huge cry that it’s a conspiracy.

They do appear to have been remarkably incompetent given botched intubations, leaky ventilators, failure to administer antibiotics in timely fashion, and the like.

@Firefly1987 The reason serious complications are rare in any treatment is the safeguards and training put in place to minimise risks. In a failing unit, there will be more serious/rare incidents because of all the things pointed out in numerous reports, e.g lack of experienced staff, poor hygiene, low staffing levels, lack of senior supervision, etc.

It's not a conspiracy; it is basic maths.

COCH also had a spike in stillbirths during the same period; I will await the overdue arrest of the serial-killing maternity nurse, since murder is just common sense in such spikes, right? It has nothing to do with the serious failings highlighted several times over on that unit and many others.

Did you listen to Clare Bolton’s experience of her Caesarian at CoC and the aftermath?? Caesarians are more likely to go wrong in an understaffed unit with inexperienced staff.

Rare isn't never.

And 3000 babies a year were born at Chester. You would expect some of them to have rare conditions from that number alone. Certainly, you'd expect 3-6 to have severe injuries, from that statistic.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say emergency delivery of triplets sharing a placenta (a far rarer than 1 in a thousand occurrence) might even be above average risk)

So the argument that baby O can't have had a birth injury is not remotely supported by that number @Firefly1987 produced there.

Were many of the other diagnoses the panel suggested rare? Weren't they mostly things like pneumonia, sepsis, pneumothorax etc? The only rare ones I can think of are for babies A and O, both of which were connected with verified rare maternity issues. But maybe I'm missing something?

Yes the simultaneous spike in stillbirths is interesting. Apart from anything else that may have led to more Caesarians.

Once the defence get access to the obstetric notes, which I think will have to be released now, we’ll have a better picture of what was happening across the 2 units.

I've lost count of the sheer number of rare and very rare incidents affecting this one unit over just 12 months.

Any given rare condition is unlikely in any given baby, but because there are many rare conditions and many babies, encountering some rare condition in some baby is much less unlikely.

E.g. a rare disease is one that affects 1 in 2000 people or fewer, but because there are over 6500 different rare diseases, roughly 1 in 20 people has some rare disease. So out of each 1000 patients, there'd be about 50 with some rare disease.

It was mentioned at the very start of the trial. They were talking about LL’s mental state in terms of attending court and Ben Myers said they were trying to get hold of Prof Jane Ireland, who had prepared the psychological reports, to come and assess her. And there was mention of another report prepared by a Dr Bowers.

The defence never submitted any psychological reports as evidence though.

I tell you what the rarest beast of all - a serial killer. Who operates with such invisibility that no-one sees a single thing on a busy neonate unit.

That rings a bell

I think I missed the distinction there between psychological assessment of Lucy Letby's mental state, which happened, and psychological profiling, which I believe was not used. Thanks for the information

Also rare:

Death from air in stomach - never documented outside Chester, despite Dr Evans saying it was clinically proven. Three cases alleged at Chester.

Venous air embolism with Lee's sign - never seen outside Chester. I think six cases alleged at Chester?

Punching a neonates liver with the force of a car-crash with no immediate effect and no external signs. ? Odds unknown

If you are sceptical about rare occurrences, you need to pick a different team.

I wonder if those psychological evaluations were a bit like the ones I experienced when going through family court - I had three, one by a forensic psychologist, one by an expert in FII, and one by a clinical psychologist. All basically said "well, she's a bit upset about being accused of harming her baby and that he's probably going to be adopted, and a bit paranoid about medical professionals and the system in general, but nothing out of the ordinary to suggest she gets off on torturing babies".....

I am surprised the prosecution didn't demand one though.

If the defence report was essentially neutral, I can see why it wasn't introduced as evidence. And it must be remembered that these reports don't confirm or eliminate guilt. Given the length of time before the reports were likely commissioned, the impact of being under scrutiny and the weight of the accusations might also have skewed the analysis somewhat.

The FII expert who did me basically said I might have mild BPD and that I should humble myself in the face of overwhelming expert opinion. Misogynistic twat.

You consistently conflate having doubts about the safety of this conviction with belief in innocent. There are people on this thread in both of those positions. What is interesting are the people actually looking at facts and learning, instead of spouting the same opinions and calling anyone who does not agree with them names.

I was specifically referring to a poster saying "oh won't someone think of her fertility" and how she should sue for those lost years 🙄if that's not believing in her innocence I don't know what is. Presumably no one who thinks there's the tiniest possibility she could be guilty wants her having her own children.

is absolutely right. There is a long history of medical misogyny which blames women for childrens ill health - whether mothers or in this case nurses. There are scores of cases where what was "obvious" was found out to be wrong and fueled by what can best be described as nastiness.

Most nurses are female so I'm not sure how you get round this misogyny problem whilst also taking into account the very real danger a tiny minority of these women pose.

The odds of one woman causing all of that through deliberate harm are significantly more likely than them all happening naturally in isolation.

Not really. We have far more documented cases of venous air embolism outside Chester. They have never shown Lee's sign. Why would that happen just at Chester?

Babies get air in their stomachs all the time on CPAP, way more than a little syringe full. Why would they only die at Chester?

The rules of science and medicine don't change when things are done deliberately instead of accidentally.

They weren't hospital notes they were handover notes. These are what nurses keep in their pockets all shift to give essential information about their patients and to write their plans on for their patients. While these are confidential and should be thrown away at the end of shift it is not hard to understand sometimes forgetting. While it is wrong that she kept them rather than shredding them or taking them back to the hospital to be destroyed I wonder if she kept them to learn from perhaps. Of course that doesn't make it right but it doesn't make her a murderer either.

They’re not in isolation they’re all in a failing unit.

How many more failing units/hospitals are there than serial killers?

Have you read the Ockenden report??

At first thought she was innocent now I think she’s guilty

Were these not emergency reports just in relation to why they needed to delay the trial?
She had moved prisons and I believe had been left without her medication for a few days which had a serious effect on her.

When it's looked at from a manslaughter perspective there's way more evidence of substandard care from the doctors, so I don't see how it could point to Letby doing something that is undetermined and just guesswork.

Ive wondered sometimes if she was someone who didnt really know what she was doing

It's clear that some of the doctors didn't seem to have a clue what they were doing.
Several experts have now called out many serious mistakes with the care of these babies and they don't relate to Lucy Letby.

Had you ever heard about Noah Robinson who was born at the COCH in 2014?

An inquest heard he died less than four days later after doctors mistakenly put a breathing tube into his gullet, which connects to the stomach. It should have gone into his trachea.
They also ignored five warning signs – from X-rays and other equipment, which they wrongly assumed were faulty. Mrs Robinson said there was only one senior doctor on duty when Noah began to deteriorate on March 22.
Recording a verdict of misadventure, coroner Nicholas Rheinberg told the inquest in Chester in February 2015: ‘There were very considerable signs [the tube was incorrectly positioned] and I find it surprising these signs were not realised.’
He said an assumption that equipment was faulty was ‘extraordinary’.
‘Shouldn’t the first assumption be the tube is in the wrong place, or that’s a strong possibility?’ he asked.
‘It’s like flying an aeroplane and seeing the oil gauge come on and you assume the gauge must be wrong, rather than the oil pressure is low.’
Mrs Robinson, who now has a daughter, was dismayed by the hospital’s level of care.
‘We put our trust in the doctors to look after Noah, but they didn’t do what they were supposed to,’ she said. ‘We feel terribly let down by the NHS.’

This is really indicative of how things continued to be at the COCH, it seemed like no one had a clue what was going on and they were all apparently walking around completely oblivious and making mistakes and missing things and then acting oblivious if a baby collapsed or died.

Have you listened to the BBC radio episode that was posted early in the thread? Absolutely shocking failures in care at the COCH, and what we know so far seems to only be the tip of the iceberg.

Well Stuart Clifton, the detective who led the Beverly Allitt investigation, initially branded Lucy Letby as a copycat murderer after she was convicted and said it was almost like she read the Allitt book, he's since come out after reviewing the evidence properly and said this is likely to be the greatest miscarriage of justice this century and that he believes Lucy Letby is innocent.