A "healthcare professional" has been arrested on suspicion of murdering eight babies and attempting to kill six others at a hospital.

[Magicpaintbrush]

Just saw this on the bbc website: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-44696813

If the person in question is guilty of this, well, horrific doesn't even begin to cover it.

That's scary, it's our local maternity hospital.

Oh my god, my friend works there. How awful.

I have just seen this and I am horrified.

What.

Jesus

It’s awful. I wonder why they are referred to as a ‘healthcare professional’ in inverted commas. Maybe a nursery nurse or someone. How horrific for the families involved.

They're not identifying the person, Larry. By saying that, they could be anyone in the hospital - anyone who is medically trained, that is.

Yes I suppose you are right. I shouldn’t speculate. My thoughts are with the families.

‘Nursery nurse’ isn’t an HCP. They are an early years/childcare professional (also not a ‘nurse’).

Thing is though, you have to have a valid swipe card to gain access as a member of staff and your swipe card only works for the area you work in. I did my training in Chester and it was the only ward that was practically sealed up tight. I don't know how they can have done it; all the meds needs second checking with another nurse and hcas don't have access to the drugs cupboard even though their swipe card will gain access to the unit.

This shouldn't be possible

I know Spork which is why I was speculating due to the fact that HCP was in inverted commas as if to suggest they weren’t actually a ‘professional’ and by that I mean in a regulated profession (not in anyway to belittle the awesome work NN’s do).

Yes drugs & fluids should be locked up to avoid risk of contamination/tampering but we don’t know that it was a drug error or issue, do we? It could have been tampering with monitoring equipment or oxygenation levels, or anything else accessible by the bedside.

Honeybee you’re right, it shouldn’t be possible but usually in horrendous cases like this there have been massive systems failures that have allowed one rogue individual to take advantage.

It could be a pharmacist, a Dr, a nurse, anyone with a healthcare professional registration with cause to be in that area, I suppose.

There's very very little information at this point. Review seems to indicate that it's not at all clear how or why the babies died, which would make a murder case very hard to make. It's possible the arrested HCP simply had the very bad luck to have been on shift with more babies who died than anyone else (this has happened before: Google Lucia de Berk, a case which also involved infant deaths in hospital).

The article doesn't put healthcare professional in inverted commas, so it presumably means what it says - someone employed in the hospital as a health care worker, e.g. a doctor, nurse, midwife or health care assistant. Much less likely it could be someone from another discipline, I'd have thought.

Poor little lambs. This is unimaginable news for their families. So awful to lose a child but then to find out it was the result of someone's deliberate actions.

I think ‘healthcare professional’ has been used as a catch all term to include anyone with a professional registration but to limit the risk of identifying a potentially innocent individual.

So awful to lose a child but then to find out it was the result of someone's deliberate actions.

It doesn't seem to be at all clear or certain that that is what has happened though. It doesn't seem like there is solid evidence of foul play or even clear causes of deaths. The process started because the hospital had high rates of neonatal death, but one hospital is always going to have the highest rate of neonatal death.

Maybe the woman arrested will ultimately be convicted of causing these deaths, but I think it's really important we not get ahead of ourselves. It's a long long way from an arrest to prosecution to conviction.

I had my first baby there in the 1980s

I used to work at the same hospital where Beverley Allitt worked and it was an awful time for the hospital and wider community. It ultimately resulted in the closure of most of the paediatric services and therefore the labour ward. So serious implications.

Really hope this is not a similar situation with a crazy nurse/doctor.

Wasn’t there a female nurse arrested at Stepping Hill a few years ago and it turned out she was innocent? I know in that case they just got the wrong person and someone else was eventually found guilty but they had proof then of contaminated saline bags. At the Beverley Allitt hospital they had proof of malpractice/murder it was just a case of working out who was doing it. I don’t know how you can gather that sort of evidence retrospectively??

Queen the deaths on the ward leapt up significantly between 2015 and 2016 and they've arrested someone.

I think it's pretty clear.

Queen the deaths on the ward leapt up significantly between 2015 and 2016 and they've arrested someone.

That doesn't, in itself, prove anything. There could be a dozen reasons for the change, from pure chance to staffing changes to a bad batch of drugs.

Yes, they've arrested someone. I'm not saying she ISN'T guilty, but many many people are arrested and released. And it's a lot dicier to be sure about this stuff when your only basis for investigating is a higher rate of deaths rather than specific evidence of non-accidental harm. As I mentioned, see Lucia de Berk, who was convicted and then exonerated of multiple murders largely because more people died on her shifts than some dodgy statistics said was likely.

When you’re looking at such small numbers is it statistically significant? I would say a jump from 3 to 8 isn’t as significant as from 30 to 80.

Plus a report into the increase in deaths has already attributed it to staffing gaps, poor training, communication, etc. Of course it could be that this report missed the fact a member of staff is a psychopath. I’m not saying this person s innocent, but there is certainly a chance that she could be.

And quote from the BBC article:

A review by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health the following February said no "definitive explanation" had been found for the increase in mortality rates at the neonatal unit and there were no "obvious factors" linking the deaths.

How do you convict someone of murder when you can't be sure how the deaths happened and they don't appear to be linked?

The reason they caught Allit in the end was that she was the only nurse on every shift where there was an unexpected death or near miss/unexpected collapse. High levels of insulin started to be found in these infants.

I’m guessing if at Chester the deaths are from 2016 and 2015 they haven’t found incorrectly high doses of drugs in the babies because if they had a serious police investigation would have been started at the time.

I'd hope that would be tested