“Consistent with” says: she could have done it. The event is surely also consistent with other scenarios. Probably it is also consistent with actions of other nurses at other moments. I moreover imagine that accidental introduction of air into a cannula used for intravenous administration of necessary fluids is possible due to faulty apparatus or damaged bottles of fluids. At present we only have experts who were employed at the hospital or instructed by the prosecution. The defence will have instructed other experts. We will hear from them later. The question remains: if the collapse was completely unexpected and if it was so obviously weird why did the hypothesis of an injection of air not come up earlier? How come it’s taken five years to gather this evidence?
But it didn't take 5 years to get this evidence. They figured this out in the initial police investigation, and obviously there was unproven suspicions of her which is why she was moved to an admin role before the police started. It's taken 5 years to investigate all these cases but also cases of attempted murder, and other hospitals she trained in.
Also these are not experts employed by the hospital or instructed by the prosecution. These are external independent clinicians who have nothing to do with the hospital and did their review long before this case was even sent to the CPS. They have nothing to gain as they work in different parts of the country and frankly owe nothing to the hospital or the consultants/nurses there.
Frankly if it was a hospital cover up - they didn't need to start a police investigation. The initial RHPC report didn't speak of any criminal findings, or equipment damage and failure, or hold anyone responsible. If there was faulty apparatus, damaged bottles, surely 1 of the 2 independent reviews by external organisations would have called it out? The Trust could have avoided all this scandal and expense by just adopting the RHPC recommendations of staffing models etc. Everyone could have carried on as is because even the parents weren't demanding a post mortem. Clearly someone at the hospital, or many people were concerned there was actual foul play going on which is why they instigated this long, drawn out investigation AND moved LL to admin duties. You need to be very sure there's wrong doing, to discuss doing a post mortem on already traumatised families - it's not just standard practice.
The most important thing here is - there were multiple cases of the exact same unusual phenomenon happening, always when Lucy was in the room alone even when she wasn't supposed to be. You'd assume that after the first time or so it happened to her, she would be extra careful going forward to keep meticulous notes or flag to her superiors she thought something was wrong? They did say there was no notes found where she had requested insulin bags to be tested or IVs to be tested etc. Forget a criminal investigation, is someone's performance at work not judged by the % of errors/deaths/near misses they have compared to their peers? Given the total number of deaths at that hospital in the year, and the fact majority belonged to one nurse (so no other individual nurse could have had the same number of deaths associated with them), even from a line manager view, would you not be concerned why one nurse had much worse outcomes than all the others?
Wouldn't she herself be concerned by it and try to figure it out - instead she tells the police she can't remember the details of any of them. Obviously her leadership were concerned because they moved her off clinical duties and brought the police in. Her callousness at how many babies died in her care would be surprising to me. Unless the defence can prove instances where she raised an alarm or tried to discuss it with her superiors proactively, I think they were right to look at her performance against her peers.
MOO
www.chesterstandard.co.uk
