Lucy Letby hospital consultant says inquiry makes for grim reading

One of the senior doctors who tried to raise concerns about Lucy Letby with hospital managers has told the BBC the final inquiry report makes for “grim reading”.

Consultant paediatrician Dr John Gibbs worked at the Countess of Chester Hospital throughout the period in 2015 to 2016 when Letby murdered seven babies, and attempted to murder seven more, on the neonatal unit.

He said that he accepted that consultants must bear “collective” responsibility for some of the failings identified in the report.

“I wish we consultants had been brave enough to follow our suspicions and escalate things to the police earlier,” he told the BBC.

“When I say, ‘we consultants’, I am responsible as well and if my other consultant colleagues didn’t go to the police, I should have.”

The Thirlwall Inquiry was launched after former nurse Letby was convicted in 2023, and the final report was published on Tuesday.

In the 822-page document, Lady Justice Thirlwall described “a complete failure to protect babies on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital”.

The report found that the police “should have been notified earlier than they were” and that hospital managers had repeatedly dismissed consultants’ concerns.

Reflecting on the findings for the first time, Gibbs said: “I wasn’t expecting it to be an easy read and it certainly isn’t. I’d imagine it’s an extremely difficult read for the parents of the babies concerned.

“As I admitted when I appeared before the inquiry to give evidence, I feel we failed the babies and I apologise to the families for that.”

Gibbs, who began working in Chester in 1994 and is now retired, agreed with the report’s finding that hospital executives had multiple opportunities to act and potentially save babies’ lives while the deaths were happening.

“But it was during that 11 months after Lucy Letby was moved off the unit, before the police got involved, that it was a very difficult atmosphere, very tense, very stressful dealing with the managers,” he added.

Managers “were determined to ensure that we accepted Lucy Letby had been wrongly suspected of doing any harm,” the senior doctor explained.

He also spoke of the failures of his and his wider team, specifically referencing a doctor who disregarded blood test results that suggested a baby had been poisoned with insulin in August 2015.

While one of his colleagues had missed the relevance of the results when they came back from the lab, it had been a collective team failure, Dr Gibbs concluded.

“Others of us were on call and covering the neonatal unit over the next week or two before the baby moved out of the unit. We all had the opportunity to review the notes.”