Letby hospital boss accepts 'big personal failure'

The former chairman of the hospital where serial killer Lucy Letby murdered babies has said his decision to not invite the doctors who suspected her to an important meeting was "a big personal failure".

Sir Duncan Nichol chaired the board of directors at the Countess of Chester Hospital at the time Letby killed seven infants and tried to kill seven others between June 2015 and June 2016.

He also described an "emotional meeting" with one of those doctors after the police investigation began where he had apologised for not intervening sooner.

Sir Duncan has spoken publicly about the case for the first time at the public inquiry into the circumstances around Letby's offending and the NHS response.

Letby had been removed from the neonatal unit in July 2016 and placed on clerical duties after senior consultants expressed concerns about her links to unexplained deaths and collapses of babies.

However, at an extraordinary board meeting, on 10 January 2017, the hospital's medical director Ian Harvey recommended "assisting" her return to the unit.

Senior consultants had been invited to a previous extraordinary board meeting on 14 July 2016 in which one, Dr Ravi Jayaram, said their suspicions about Letby were the "elephant in the room".

However, they were not invited to the second meeting.

Sir Duncan told the Thirlwall Inquiry, sitting at Liverpool Town Hall, that he accepted it was ultimately up to him to decide who attended that meeting.

"I regard it as personally a big failure on my part that the consultants were present at the first extraordinary board meeting and they were not present at this one, and they should have been," he said.

He also offered an emotional apology to the families of Letby's victims.

"I've never encountered a situation which has generated as much angst and stress as this one," Sir Duncan said.

"I wanted to say that the Countess of Chester Hospital failed to keep babies safe in their care and that’s something that I found very, very stressful over time, and more importantly that caused unimaginable grief for the families whose babies died and I am so sorry that that happened in the way that it did."

Sir Duncan, who was chief executive of the NHS Management Executive between 1989 and 1994, was also asked about another meeting on 30 June 2016 involving senior directors and some of the doctors.

Rachel Langdale KC, counsel to the inquiry, said records from the meeting showed consultant Dr Jim McCormick had said: "This is a Beverley Allitt /[Harold] Shipman situation."

Allitt was a nurse who was jailed for murdering four babies in Lincolnshire in 1991, while Shipman was a GP who murdered up to 215 patients over a 30-year period.

Ms Langdale asked: "Did that make you sit up when you heard that":[]}