As Dr John Gibbs, who gave crucial evidence against Lucy Letby, suggests a retrial could be “the most appropriate thing for everyone”, the Mirror hears from Dr Susan Gilby, who successfully sued the Countess of Chester for unfair dismissal
On the morning of July 3, 2018, Lucy Letby was arrested at her Chester home on suspicion of eight counts of murder and six counts of attempted murder of vulnerable newborns.
Suspicions had been raised over the neonatal nurse as early as September 2015, when Countess of Chester Hospital staff began to notice a disturbing correlation between infant deaths and Letby’s shift patterns.
As the death toll rose, the connection became impossible to ignore. For months, dread filled the hospital corridors, but, as the Thirwall Inquiry would later determine, senior managers were slow to react, delaying urgent meetings for which medics pleaded.
Had Letby been removed from her duties in October 2015, when concerns were first raised, twin babies O and P may not have died in June 2016. It wasn’t until June 29, 2016, that Letby was finally removed from frontline duties.
Mere weeks after Letby’s first arrest, Dr Susan Gilby joined the Countess of Chester as medical director and deputy chief executive. As Dr Gilby would later testify during the inquiry, having reviewed the June 2016 CQC report, she’d expected to “go into a high-performing organisation”.
Ahead of her start date, Dr Gilby was “brought up to speed” on some of the unfolding issues. She told the Mirror: “I was aware that there had been many unexplained and unexpected deaths and collapses on the unit in 2015/16, and I was aware that there were some relationship problems between the paediatrician consultants and the executive team, and that the chair was trying to improve relations between those two groups.”
The Thirwall Inquiry would later refer to this division as a “gulf”. Consultants were forced to apologise to Letby, and management even threatened to report whistleblowers to the General Medical Council (GMC).
Dr Gilby, appointed following the retirement of Mr Ian Harvey, was informed of Letby’s arrest shortly before the announcement. The staff reaction was unexpected. She recalled: “I thought I would find a team who were very distressed by this turn of events, as I said in my Thirwall statement. But in fact, I found that three weeks after the arrest, they were very entrenched in their view that nothing would come of this.”
Considering why this might have been case, Dr Gilby reflected: “I’ve no idea why they thought that. It seemed that they’d just not been professionally curious enough about why babies were collapsing and dying unexpectedly and in an unexplained manner on their unit.
“[…] If you have repeated cardiovascular collapses and death, and you can’t explain them, and they weren’t expected, that just doesn’t happen in clinical practice.”
Dr Gilby spent three hours, alongside Dr Brearey, analysing the timeline of each incident. She also read consultant questions submitted to Mr Chambers, telling the inquiry how she could “see the anguish coming off the page”, and how she’d noticed her predecessor’s “very defensive” response.
She continued: “It was important that I listened to the paediatricians and looked at all of the documents I had at my disposal myself, because I was being asked to deal with the paediatricians, and also to arrange the mediation. I met with Dr Brearey, and it was minutes into that conversation that I realised that the executive team had got this very wrong. I absolutely did expect at some point that there would be charges. I didn’t know when that would be.”
It was, as Dr Gilby emphasised, a “complicated case”, with each incident requiring a separate investigation. Three days after her first arrest, Letby was released. She was rearrested and rereleased on June 10, 2019, at her parents’ Hereford home. The third time, on November 10, 2020, Letby was charged with eight counts of murder plus 10 counts of attempted murder, and denied bail.
By this point, Dr Gilby explained, “virtually all of the previous senior leadership team had moved on”, but she was able to inform them “out of courtesy”. Dr Gilby said: “Those who were still in the organisation were devastated. There was nobody in the senior leadership team who believed that this was the wrong thing to happen.
“They were distressed, and absolutely were looking at themselves in terms of, ‘Could we have known about this? Should we have known, and did we actually know?’ There was also a lot of concern about supporting the staff who were witnesses, and who had to be interviewed multiple times by the police, and were now going to have to give evidence as witnesses in a criminal court.
“There was a lot of horror for the parents in particular, and just wondering what they were going through. It’s unimaginable, really. There was nobody that I spoke to, including very senior people, board members, who felt that there was any issue with the charges that had been brought, other than could they have done something sooner to prevent this.”
Letby, now 36, was convicted of killing seven babies and attempting to murder seven more, and was given 15 whole-life orders. Since 2015-16, there has been just one death at the neonatal unit, in September 2019. For her colleagues, the long-term impact has been profound. Some have reported suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as severe depression and anxiety.
In December 2022, Dr Gilby resigned, filing a claim for constructive unfair dismissal, after she’d made allegations of bullying and harassment against the trust’s chairman, Ian Haythornthwaite. Dr Gilby told a tribunal how one Trust director, Ros Fallon, had taken her to the pub that October, telling her it was “time for you to go”, adding, “If you don’t agree to go, we will start a process against you.”
While Dr Gilby was offered a payoff to walk away, this was under the condition that she drop any allegations. Having previously raised concerns at work without issue, Dr Gilby told us: “It was a shock to me, to be honest, to find that in Chester there was not a history of openness when listening to people who were raising concerns.
“It was an even bigger shock to me when, as a chief executive who was medically qualified with a background of being a medical director in three organisations and a consultant in critical care and anesthesia, that when I raised concerns that the behaviors of the chair and others on the board were putting patients at risk and were putting staff, including myself, at risk, that… it wasn’t just that we weren’t listened to. I was asked to keep quiet and offered a bribe to do so.”
Dr Gilby was awarded £1.4 million in damages after it was ruled she’d been wrongly dismissed, and Haythornthwaite resigned. Looking back at her time on the Countess, Dr Gilby’s thoughts remain with the families of the victims, some of whom have been left with lifelong injuries. The money, she notes, could have been better spent on patient care.
She remarked: “I really am concerned that in the higher echelons of the NHS, right at the very top, there isn’t necessarily always the openness and willingness to accept that there might be a problem that we would expect, and then that cascades its way down into some organisations.”
This comes as Dr John Gibbs, one of three consultants whose evidence helped convict Letby, told The Sun he holds “a very small concern that there may not have been any deliberate harm done”, arguing that a retrial could be “the most appropriate thing for everyone”.
Regarding this suggested retrial, Dr Gilby commented: “The convictions are sound, in my view. There are other cases that she could have been convicted of. The appeal, she’s been convicted by two juries. The people who are best placed to investigate unexplained, unexpected deaths are the police, and they did that. The people who are best placed to present the evidence are the Prosecution Service, and the people best placed to make a judgment are the jury and the judge. And then the appeal court. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what’s happened, and I’m not in a position, and neither is anybody else, to go behind that.”
Do you have a story to share? Email me at julia.banim@reachplc.com
You must be logged in to post a comment Login