Lucy Letby could have accessed patient notes and reports on baby deaths after she was taken off a neonatal unit over suspicions she was deliberately harming infants, a public inquiry has heard.
Consultants at the Countess of Chester Hospital demanded the removal amid mounting concerns about Letby’s presence at a series of unexpected and unexplained deaths and collapses of infants in 2015 and 2016.
Hospital executives bowed to the request following the deaths of two previously stable triplet boys on successive days in June 2016 as they ordered an independent review.
The following month Letby started a new temporary clerical role in the hospital’s risk and patient safety office, the Thirlwall Inquiry into events surrounding Letby’s crimes has heard.
Giving evidence on Tuesday, one of her then office colleagues said she believed it was “not appropriate” that Letby was placed there.
Annemarie Lawrence said Letby initially worked in the complaints department in an adjoining office but she would often come into their room to make teas and coffees.
Mrs Lawrence recalled she made a complaint to a nursing boss in autumn 2016 over an incident in which Letby knew about a baby collapse before she did.
She said: “I was coming into work one morning and as I came up the stairs Lucy came out of her office on the corridor to greet me and she was very distressed.
“She almost jumped down my throat really and said ‘there’s been a collapse and a baby has been transferred out, does that mean somebody else is going to be under investigation and I can go back to work?’
“She bombarded me with a lot of questions and I didn’t know what she was talking about because I wasn’t aware of a collapse .. but she knew this information and it had not reached me.
“Lucy had access to information which she shouldn’t have and I wondered whether there was someone on the neonatal unit who is feeding her information but it concerns me that she knows something clinically that I don’t know as the risk lead.”
Asked if she knew if Letby had access to patient notes or baby death reports, she replied: “I think if she wanted to look at them she absolutely could have.”
Lucy Letby was convicted at Manchester Crown Court (Elizabeth Cook/PA)
Mrs Lawrence added that “regular conversations” would take place along the corridor between Letby and some of her nursing managers about her “being made a scapegoat for poor medical care and a lack of teamworking”.
Counsel to the inquiry Nicholas de la Poer KC asked: “Were they simply offering a listening ear or were they contributing and making comment themselves about whether it was true?”
Mrs Lawrence said: “I think at the time that’s what they truly believed.”
She said though she was “conflicted” because in May 2016 she had raised concerns with the head of risk and patient safety, Ruth Millward, after she had seen a chart which showed the recent deaths on the unit and the staff members on duty at the time.
Letby’s name “jumped out of the page”, she said.
The former midwife said she considered the possibility of deliberate harm as she told the inquiry: “It’s not unusual in maternity to have a cluster of stillbirths if we have for example a community acquired infection, but over the year they would balance out.
“We don’t normally have real spikes in stillbirths but because I was new to the neonatalogy world and I was new to risk, it looked really really obvious that there was a real anomaly here that needed investigation.
“Ruth Millward said something along the lines of ‘you need to be really careful here Annemarie, you can’t come in here and just start throwing accusations about an individual nurse being present for all these deaths’ and ‘you need to have evidence, just because she’s present and on duty doesn’t mean there is a link’.”
The inquiry is expected to sit until early 2025 (PA)
She said she did not challenge the response because she was not experienced enough at the time but she herself again thought of Letby after the deaths of the triplet boys.
Mrs Lawrence said: “I was working alongside somebody who initially I had thought had done some terrible, terrible crimes but I felt ashamed for raising them and then I spent some time thinking if I had just raised them a little bit louder then potentially I could have prevented the deaths of two of those babies, and I didn’t.
“And then I had to work alongside her and listen to conversations that perhaps she might have been innocent, and it was really difficult.”
Letby, 34, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016.
The inquiry is expected to sit until early 2025, with findings published by late autumn of that year.