A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?
The article is definitely very one-side and leaves out some of the more questionable circumstantial evidence (Child E & G) but a very interesting read. It is also blocked in the UK because they hate free-speech.
TLDR: Very flimsy medical evidence and BS statistical evidence used in case. The hospital was severely understaffed and a literal ****hole (sewage backing up into the sinks and floors frequently). Nobody saw her attack the infants and autopsies showed the babies died of natural causes. She had treated all the babies at some point, though was not always present when the babies took a turn for the worst. The deaths/sudden collapses were a combination of very high risk pre-term, underweight, multiples, and other high risk babies (i.e. mother had an underlying condition). There were 15 deaths in the neonatal unit (4 in the prior year, up from 2 the year before) during the 13 month period she worked the neonatal unit floor and she was convicted of killing 7 & attempted murder of 7 more. The number of deaths declined after she was taken off the floor because one week later the hospital was downgraded and could no longer see the most vulnerable babies.
A few examples:
The article is definitely very one-side and leaves out some of the more questionable circumstantial evidence (Child E & G) but a very interesting read. It is also blocked in the UK because they hate free-speech.
TLDR: Very flimsy medical evidence and BS statistical evidence used in case. The hospital was severely understaffed and a literal ****hole (sewage backing up into the sinks and floors frequently). Nobody saw her attack the infants and autopsies showed the babies died of natural causes. She had treated all the babies at some point, though was not always present when the babies took a turn for the worst. The deaths/sudden collapses were a combination of very high risk pre-term, underweight, multiples, and other high risk babies (i.e. mother had an underlying condition). There were 15 deaths in the neonatal unit (4 in the prior year, up from 2 the year before) during the 13 month period she worked the neonatal unit floor and she was convicted of killing 7 & attempted murder of 7 more. The number of deaths declined after she was taken off the floor because one week later the hospital was downgraded and could no longer see the most vulnerable babies.
A few examples:
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In June, 2015, three babies died at the Countess. First, a woman with antiphospholipid syndrome, a rare disorder that can cause blood clotting, was admitted to the hospital. She was thirty-one weeks pregnant with twins, and had planned to give birth in London, so that a specialist could monitor her and the babies, but her blood pressure had quickly risen, and she had to have an emergency C-section at the Countess. The next day, Letby was asked to cover a colleague's night shift. She was assigned one of the twins, a boy, who has been called Child A. (The court order forbade identifying the children, their parents, and some nurses and doctors.) A nursing note from the day shift said that the baby had had "no fluids running for a couple of hours," because his umbilical catheter, a tube that delivers fluids through the abdomen, had twice been placed in the wrong position, and "doctors busy." A junior doctor eventually put in a longline, a thin tube threaded through a vein, and Letby and another nurse gave the child fluid. Twenty minutes later, Letby and a third nurse, a few feet away, noticed that his oxygen levels were dropping and that his skin was mottled. The doctor who had inserted the longline worried that he had placed it too close to the child's heart, and he immediately took it out. But, less than ninety minutes after Letby started her shift, the baby was dead. "It was awful," she wrote to a colleague afterward. "He died very suddenly and unexpectedly just after handover."
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Several days later, a woman came to the hospital after her water broke. She was sent home and told to wait. More than twenty-four hours later, she noticed that the baby was making fewer movements inside her. "I was concerned for infection because I hadn't been given any antibiotics," she said later. She returned to the hospital, but she still wasn't given antibiotics. She felt "forgotten by the staff, really," she said. Sixty hours after her water broke, she had a C-section. The baby, a girl who was dusky and limp when she was born, should have been treated with antibiotics immediately, doctors later acknowledged, but nearly four hours passed before she was given the medication. The next night, the baby's oxygen alarm went off. "Called Staff Nurse Letby to help," a nurse wrote. The baby continued to deteriorate throughout the night and could not be revived. A pathologist found pneumonia in the baby's lungs and wrote that the infection was likely present at birth.
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Four months later, another baby died. She had been born at twenty-seven weeks, just past the age that the unit treated. At one point, she was transferred to another hospital, called Arrowe Park, for more specialized careshe had an infection and a small bleed in her brainbut after two nights she returned to the Countess, where her condition deteriorated. Brearey told me, "Senior nursing staff were blaming the neonatal unit that sent back the baby, saying that they hadn't been entirely honest, that they were just trying to clear a space." The baby's mother worried that the staff at the Countess were too busy to pay proper attention to her daughter. She recalled that a nurse named Nicky was "sneezing and coughing whilst putting her hands in [the baby's] incubator." She added, "To top it off, whilst Nicky was in the room, the doctor, who was seeing another baby, asked Nicky if she was full of a cold, to which she said, 'Yeah, I've been full of it for days.' So even the doctors were aware and didn't do anything." In a survey the next year of more than a thousand staff members at the Countess, about two-thirds said that they had felt pressure to come to work even when they were ill. (None of the hospitals mentioned in this piece would comment, citing the court order.)
The staff tried to send the girl to a specialized unit at a different hospital, but, while they were waiting to confirm the transfer, she began struggling to breathe. Her designated nurse was not yet trained in intensive care, and she shouted for help. Letby, who had been assigned to a different baby, came into the room, followed by two doctors, but the baby continued to decline and could not be revived.
