Hospital executives refused to call the police about Lucy Letby because of a “concern that we will be in the media spotlight”, an inquiry has been told.
Murthy Saladi, a consultant paediatrician, urged hospital bosses in an email on 29 June 2016 to contact Cheshire constabulary about a series of “unexpected and unexplained” deaths.
This was less than a week after Letby had murdered her final newborn victims – two triplet boys – by injecting them with air on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester hospital in north-west England.
Letby, 34, is serving a whole-life prison term after being convicted across two trials of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder another seven between June 2015 and June 2016.
Some experts have questioned Letby’s convictions but those doubts are not being considered by the Thirlwall inquiry, which is examining the concerns raised about the nurse and how they were handled by the hospital.
Saladi told the inquiry on Thursday that unexpected deaths were “extremely rare” at the district general hospital and that initially doctors thought there might have been an infection on the unit.
However, he said that the suspicion of senior doctors began to fall on Letby when it was noticed she was the “one member of staff who was associated with all these deaths”.
Two days after the death of the second triplet, Child P, on 24 June 2016, Saladi and other consultants believed Letby should be removed from the neonatal unit, the inquiry heard, and they expressed those views in an email to Karen Rees, then head of nursing.
The inquiry heard that Saladi emailed senior doctors and executives the following day to say that the police should be contacted as they could “look into people’s lives” and search the nurse’s home.
But in a meeting on 30 June the executives said they would order an independent external review instead of calling Cheshire constabulary, the inquiry heard.
Saladi said the executives were “looking at it as doctors versus nurses” and they would get independent input from a team at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH).
Asked whether Stephen Cross, the hospital’s then-director of legal services and corporate affairs, had made any comment about police involvement during this meeting, Saladi said: “I think there was talk of ‘red tape’ like ‘the media vans will be all on our grounds’. There was some concern that we will be in the media spotlight.”
Giving evidence at Liverpool town hall, Saladi said the response of executives was that “if you’re calling the police then all the media spotlight will be on us, nobody will be coming to our labour ward or neonatal unit, so lets get independent input and if that shows [deliberate harm] then let’s go to the police”.
The paediatrician said he believed hospital bosses had “unfortunately” already “made up their mind” about not contacting the police at this point.
Another consultant, John Gibbs, told the inquiry this week that he now believed the police should have been contacted months earlier, in February 2016, when a wide-ranging review was unable to find any common link between the deaths other than Letby being the only member of staff on duty for each of them.
Richard Baker KC, for some of the bereaved families, asked Saladi about the initial concern of doctors about an infection or hospital bug causing the babies’ deaths.
Baker said: “The babies were investigated for infection and reliable evidence was obtained that those babies had not been infected by any contamination from the ward.”
Saladi agreed and said: “There was no infection in the babies, that is correct.”
Letby, 34, was removed from the neonatal unit in early July 2016 but it was another 10 months before the police were contacted in May 2017.
Saladi said the relationship between consultants and managers at the Countess of Chester had broken down by January 2017.
The inquiry has heard that executives told consultants in January 2017 that two external reviews had cleared Letby of any wrongdoing and ordered the senior doctors to apologise to her before she returned to the unit.
Saladi said former chief executive Tony Chambers had “banged the table” and told the consultants that the hospital was “drawing a line under” the allegations.
“I do remember the red face of Tony Chambers, his forceful voice and him banging on the table,” he said in a statement to the inquiry.
