Families of Lucy Letby’s victims were treated “appallingly” by hospital executives who failed to disclose key information after her murders, the former chief executive of Countess of Chester hospital has said.
In her first newspaper interview since Letby was jailed for life, Susan Gilby suggested the hospital’s board of directors were also kept in the dark about her crimes and the missed opportunities to stop her.
She told the Guardian: “The chairman and the non-executive directors were horrified, absolutely horrified. They were deeply upset.”
Gilby, who joined the Countess of Chester hospital shortly after Letby’s arrest in 2018, said she was appalled to discover how executives had missed several opportunities to stop the nurse – then had turned on the senior doctors who had raised the alarm.
In an intervention that will add to growing demands for a statutory inquiry, she said the first time the hospital’s directors were told the full scale of the scandal was when she briefed them in early September 2018. This was almost two years after two reviews had concluded several deaths needed further “forensic investigations”.
Gilby said she had been “horrified” when she learned from senior doctors how they had first linked Letby to unusual deaths in June 2015 – a year before she was removed from the neonatal unit – and how they were ordered to apologise to her despite concerns she was murdering days-old babies.
Gilby said she met Sir Duncan Nichol, the chair of the board at the time, and he arranged for her to brief the non-executive directors in early September 2018. This was “new information” to them at the time, she said, adding: “They were without exception very receptive to what I was telling them and why and they wanted to hear it. They were horrified.”
Nichol, a former chief executive of the NHS, has said directors were “misled” when they were told there was “no criminal activity pointing to any one individual” in December 2016.
By the time Letby was removed from the neonatal unit in July 2016 she had murdered seven babies and tried to kill another six, making her the worst child serial killer in modern Britain. Several other sudden collapses remain unexplained.
Gilby, who stood down as chief executive this year, commissioned an external review by the health consultancy Facere Melius into the hospital’s handling of the claims, which the trust is facing urgent calls to publish.
The former intensive care consultant said families were sent only partial information when they asked the hospital’s medical director, Ian Harvey, for answers about the reviews into unexplained deaths and collapses.
One family has told the Guardian they repeatedly tried to contact Harvey in response to the letters, some of which contained partial medical information that would be impossible for anyone without a clinical background to understand.
“There may be correspondence with the families that I’ve not been party to, but what I have seen was appalling,” said Gilby.
Tony Chambers, Gilby’s predecessor as chief executive, had wanted to bring Letby back to the neonatal unit in January 2017 after two reviews that executives felt exonerated the nurse. This was despite senior doctors continuing to have serious concerns. Neither of the two reviews ordered by the hospital in late 2016 examined whether the unexplained deaths were the result of deliberate harm and both recommended some deaths be “forensically” investigated further.
Harvey left the Countess of Chester hospital weeks after Letby’s arrest in July 2018, retiring to the south of France. Gilby said his parting words to her were: “Make sure you refer the paediatricians to the GMC [General Medical Council, the doctors’ regulator].”
She said Harvey and other executives had still believed the nurse had been unfairly blamed by senior doctors even after her arrest. “He wasn’t alone in the senior team of having a very fixed view of the situation in spite of the fact that the police had seen fit to make an arrest and therefore must have had plenty of evidence to put before Lucy Letby after over 12 months of investigation.
“That surprisingly fixed opinion was held not only by Ian but by each member of the senior team that I spoke to at the time.”
The intervention will add to growing calls for Rishi Sunak to strengthen the inquiry into the hospital’s handling of concerns raised about Letby during her killing spree.
In response to the allegations, Harvey said on Thursday that he apologised to the families who felt “fobbed off”. He said he had wanted to give them “detailed and accurate” answers but this was difficult while the reviews were ongoing.
Harvey declined to address the claim about the board being misled, saying only that if he had known about blood tests that proved two babies had been poisoned with insulin “I would have recommended meeting with the police immediately”. The significance of these results was only learned in February 2018.
Asked about his “fixed view” in 2018 that Letby was innocent, he said: “I do not know how Dr Gilby came to this opinion. We had approached the police and in so doing we were prepared to accept what the evidence showed.”
The Guardian has approached Chambers for comment. He has previously said that “what was shared with the board was honest and open and represented our best understanding of the outcome of the reviews at the time”.
