A neonatal expert who reviewed the deaths and collapses of babies harmed by Lucy Letby has said she feels misled over her commissioning by hospital bosses.
Dr Jane Hawdon, a consultant neonatologist, said she was not “adequately briefed” about the suspicions of senior doctors about Letby before she carried out her analysis.
Hawdon was asked by Ian Harvey, the Countess of Chester hospital’s medical director, to carry out a “case notes review” of 17 deaths and collapses on the neonatal unit in the year to June 2016.
Her study was one of two reviews ordered by Harvey in response to concerns raised by senior doctors that Letby had deliberately harmed babies.
Some consultant paediatricians had urged hospital executives to contact the police, but Harvey instead commissioned a limited analysis by Hawdon and a separate review of the neonatal unit by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
Giving evidence to the Thirlwall inquiry on Tuesday, Hawdon conceded that her report was “fairly superficial” and “an academic exercise” as it was based only on medical notes rather than a detailed examination involving consultation with the children’s doctors.
The report suggested that 13 of the 17 deaths could be explained and “may have been prevented with different care”.
However, Hawdon told the inquiry at Liverpool town hall that none of the deaths could be explained by poor care.
The senior neonatologist also said that a number of babies whose deaths she thought at the time were explainable could not now be explained by natural causes, based on newly available information.
In a witness statement read to the inquiry, Hawdon said: “I do not consider that I was adequately briefed about the concerns of the paediatricians and I don’t know why the trust chose this approach.”
Asked by Rachel Langdale KC, counsel to the inquiry, why she believed she may not have been told that consultants suspected Letby was harming babies, Hawdon said: “My speculation is that those who were instructing me … did not believe that that was a likely possibility.”
Hawdon said she may not have proceeded with her review had she known that senior doctors suspected criminality.
Peter Skelton KC, representing seven of the families of Letby’s victims, asked Hawdon whether she felt misled by Harvey, the medical director.
She replied: “I now feel misled. I can’t say who misled me but I feel misled. And, as I have said before, if those details had been made available to me the process I would have followed would have been very different.”
Hawdon agreed that the “only appropriate response” if consultants suspected murder was “to either call the police or go through safeguarding processes, which amount to the same thing in the end”.
Letby, 34, is serving a whole-life prison term after being convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder and another seven.
She has consistently denied harming any infants and is preparing a legal challenge to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. The court of appeal has rejected her attempts to overturn the convictions.
