A new-born baby collapsed at the hospital where Lucy Letby worked months after the nurse was removed from the ward, despite prosecutors’ claim that baby deaths stopped after she left being central to their case. The Telegraph has the story.
Archie McClements was born at the Countess of Chester Hospital six months after Letby had been suspended from her role over suspicious deaths and collapses of infants.
Archie died of enterovirus, which is transmitted by faecal matter, at a unit in Manchester in December 2016, shortly after being transferred there from Chester.
The prosecutors’ claims that suspicious deaths and collapses stopped after Letby was moved to an administrative role formed an important part of their evidence at her trial.
Letby was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill seven others at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016.
However, many medical and legal experts have questioned Letby’s guilt, and the Criminal Cases Review Commission is deciding whether to send her case back to the Court of Appeal.
Annalise McClements, Archie’s mother, said she was initially told that he had probably caught the illness from her during labour, but later discovered that the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester had experienced sewage and plumbing problems.
She told the Sun: “They said it was me – but they knew full well Archie could have caught it from the unit… I can’t forgive them for making me feel like that, for letting me take the blame.”
McClements said she now believed the hospital’s poor conditions were the likely cause of her son’s death.
She added: “I think he’s got the virus from the dirty sewage in the unit. How many deaths are because of that? How many deaths are the uncleanliness? It’s an explanation that makes far more sense than the alternative given.
“You could tell it was an old building. It felt run down. The toilets, the showers, all the facilities were just worn. It didn’t feel the cleanliness that you’d expect from a hospital. The unit was quite well known to have sewage coming up from the taps.”
McClements said she had also been concerned by what she perceived as the unit’s poor management, adding: “The first thing that was alarming to me when I did go to see Archie was the lack of staff.
“I couldn’t ever remember there ever being more than one person available at the time. I think I saw the consultant or a doctor once that week, and that was by chance.”
She questioned how many other children had died because of poor care at the Countess of Chester.
“Even if he didn’t die at Chester because they very quickly moved him out, he collapsed there,” she said. “But that’s not been included. So how many others aren’t being included? How many other babies started to decline or collapse and were shipped off to another hospital?”
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Dr John Snow identified the real cause of the 1854 Cholera outbreak in London. He proved it was because of sewage contaminated water and not ‘bad air’. His analysis led to massive improvements in medicine and the understanding of the causes of infection.
The Crimean war ended in 1856 and Florence Nightingale brought in huge improvements in hospital care as a consequence of her experiences and observations of British military hospitals in that war.
In the Summer of 1858 saw the Great Stink overwhelm London. The temperatures hit 30 degrees and stayed high for weeks. The river sank lower than normal, leaving sewage on the river banks. This ‘disaster’ led to the building of the London Sewers which in turn led to the building of sewage treatment plants.
It has been about 170 years since then and here we are with a hospital with sewage in it drinking water.
There’s a series of articles written by Dr Phil Hammond in Private Eye, The Lessons Of The Lucy Letby Case. Very long, several articles but well worth the read if you want to understand the ‘case’ better !!
Oh boy …..how on earth could they accuse a nurse, when conditions were/are so bad….sewage coming out of taps ??????
An appeal may lead to a retrial, which may succeed if Lucy has more/better experts than the prosecution, but that reveals the ghastly truth about healthcare killer trials … they are not trial by jury, they are trial by medical expert, and the prosecution pays for and gets the ones that win cases.
The key fact is that healthcare killer trials only have juries for show. The poor jury are bombarded for months with highly complex medical information, which they have no chance of grasping, hence they reach verdicts via the opinions of medical experts, many of whom appear to believe, with the aid of money, that killers lurk in many hospitals. Even worse, some jurors reach verdicts on emotion or demeanour.
Another ghastly fact is that jurors fail to act properly … they should acquit any charge for which they can’t understand the evidence. Bullet and stab wounds are fine, insulin injections are not.
Finally, the judges involved are pathetic, they should understand the problems with these cases, and dismiss any of them without direct witness evidence, which is all of them, because serial killer nurses don’t exist.
I agree with your comments, apart from the last sentence, “ serial killer nurses don’t exist “. Unfortunately, they do. Examples are: Charles Cullen ( USA ); Niels Hogel ( Germany ); Orville Lynn Majors ( USA ); Beverley Allitt ( UK ). There are bad apples in every profession or occupation. I don’t believe that these were wrongly convicted.
Good points. Years ago there was a case in the US of an Ethnic African maternity ward nurse, who confessed on her deathbed to swapping about 500 newborns during the course of her lifelong career. It gave her a feeling of power, knowing that hundreds of parents would be raising someone else’s child as if it were their own.
I was never convinced of this young woman’s guilt from Day one. Subsequently I read through some trial transcripts that had been posted and the stitch up was blatant. I wish I had saved those transcripts. Not surprisingly the two principal doctors involved were not Smith and Jones.
All the trial transcripts and Thirlwall testimony are available for free on the lucyletbyinnocence website.
‘Beyond reasonable doubt’ is the usual measure. It appears to me that there is quite a bit of reasonable doubt in this case.
I remember when the Lucy letby story first came out, it was understandably the top news story nationwide. Ironically the second news story at the time was the postmasters scandal where people were scapegoated to cover up government failings, seemed like the vast majority of people couldn’t see the possibility of a parallel
There’s some very odd people in this country. It’s as if they expect the government of the United Kingdom to be honest and honourable.
and on their side.
What kind of society sentences a person to die in prison based PURELY on circumstantial evidence?
I was in favour of capital punishment before this case, but not now.
This is a textbook case of:
Circle the wagons.
Close the ranks.
Choose a (low ranking) scapegoat.
Absolutely disgraceful.
You are right, in other words it is the state prosecuting someone to find the that person guilty and the state (NHS) innocent.
…and the Ethnic Indian “doctor” Ravi Jayaram “innocent”, who would have been blamed as the doctor in charge. What a coincidence that he was her most virulent accuser, repeatedly giving conflicting “witness” testimonies against her, but was not called out for it by the press, because “diversity”…
No bodies for autopsies. No witnesses. No evidence. Now no end to the mortality with her incarceration. How about liberating this young woman now while everything is reviewed objectively?
There were bodies – the postmortems were not suspicious.
There were witnesses – it’s just that they didn’t see anything.
There was evidence – she was not on the ward for one of the accusations.
If this had been on any other ward in the hospital, those that had died would have been called patients. On the neonatal ward they were called babies which gives the impression that they were viable without medical care. If for whatever reason that care was substandard then the likelihood of survival was greatly diminished.
I hope this case may lead to more awareness of the role of Ultrasound Scans in causing premature births, as well as miscarriages.