A senior doctor has told a public inquiry he is “ashamed” that he failed to protect babies from harm by serial killer nurse Lucy Letby.
Consultant paediatrician Dr John Gibbs apologised to parents of Letby’s 14 victims shortly after he was sworn in to give evidence on Tuesday at the Thirlwall Inquiry into the events at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit.
The now retired medic said: “I deeply regret and I am ashamed that I failed to protect the babies from harm by Letby, but I do understand that the parents concerned would probably prefer explanations rather than apologies.”
He said he and his fellow consultants should have contacted the police in early 2016 before Letby went on to attack other infants including the murders of two triplet boys in June that year.
The inquiry heard that, following a third baby death in June 2015, he emailed his consultant colleagues to relay concerns from registrars that the infants involved “showed a strange purpuric looking rash” and that nurses on the unit were also “very worried”.
Dr Gibbs said Letby’s name came up as a “common factor” in July 2015 because she was involved in the resuscitation attempts of all three babies and another infant who was successfully revived.
But he told counsel to the inquiry Nicholas de la Poer KC that he had no suspicions that deliberate harm was being caused at that time.
He said: “It had been felt she had been unlucky to have been involved in a number of incidents.
“It can happen to any of us and it happened to me during my career, that you have a bad run. But then that stops happening if it’s just an unfortunate coincidence.”
Immediate concerns about possible deliberate harm should have been raised, though, in August 2015, he said, with a blood test result which indicated Child F had been administered synthetic insulin.
Dr Gibbs said he did not see the result and his colleagues appeared to not appreciate its significance, but he classed it as a “collective failure” by the paediatric team.
He said: “We all had the chance to look at those results.”
He acknowledged a similar “collective failure” in April 2016 when another infant, Child L, was poisoned with insulin by Letby, but medics again missed the significance of another blood test.
The consultant said he was “unsettled” by the sudden and unexpected death of Child I in October 2015 and that towards the end of that year and into 2016 he became “more concerned”.
Dr Gibbs said: “We were trying to make sense of the number of collapses and deaths that were happening, and realising Letby was around for many of them, not all of them.”
The consultant said the “full enormity of it all hit me” when he saw an external thematic review in February 2016 which looked at deaths on the unit throughout 2015.
