UK - Nurse Lucy Letby, murder of babies, 7 Guilty of murder verdicts; 8 Guilty of attempted murder; 2 Not Guilty of attempted; 5 hung re attempted #36

[Marantz4250b]

I'm new here and joined because of the Letby case. Bear with me.

I've been reading and writing about true crime for over fifty years and, like many amateur sleuths, there are certain controversial cases which are of particular interest to me. I am not necessarily interested in cut and dried cases unless perhaps they can be deemed infamous.

When I first discovered Letby had been arrested and charged with multiple murders, I wasn't really interested in the case because there didn't seem to be any controversy about it. It seemed to be an open and shut case. Wicked nurse killed multiple babies. I assumed there must be a huge amount of evidence against her and so when she was found guilty my initial reaction was "good".

Almost immediately, friends contacted me asking what I thought about the case and I reiterated my assumption that she was guilty. After all, hadn't she been caught red-handed dislodging a breathing tube? Hadn't she confessed in her diaries?

But then the first rumblings of disquiet over her guilt were heard and I felt a prickle of unease. I am now hugely invested in the case although I have not reached a conclusion yet.

So that's my background and this is my answer to JosieJo's question:

I don't think that her original Defence team ever believed she might be innocent. It doesn't matter how senior and well regarded your team is if they believe you are guilty. Your team, of course, wants to win, often at any cost so your guilt or innocence is neither here nor there to many lawyers. I've forty years experience working in the legal profession and seen first hand that it's often about the winning, not about guilt or innocence.

In the Letby case, I believe her team decided there was virtually no evidence which might have helped them win so they were really just going through the motions. Her team were a shambles so I am glad she's changed them. At least her new team are producing experts etc in the hope of overturning her conviction.

Just my two penn'orth, of course. Thank you for reading.

Her KC, Ben Myers, is highly regarded and anyone who followed the trial with any degree of attention would know that the defence he ran was anything but a "shambles".

I'm the opposite of yourself; I was quite firmly of the opinion that she was innocent when I first heard of the case. Having followed it from the outset, though, there is little doubt in my mind that she's completely guilty.

 

[Charlot123]

thriwell was ment to be a public televised inquiry that anyone could atend thats was what the family asked for

JMO.

Here is an intersecting article.

Will Lucy Letby get a retrial? Here's what happens next with her case | Brunel University of London

www.brunel.ac.uk

MOO: The irony is, no one appears to intentionally do poor job or have ill intentions, and yet it might be the most difficult case to weigh on.

The problem I see is that everyone is stuck on "he said, she said, personalities, affairs, whatnot". Human factors. I was in that tunnel for a long time. Personalities here are complex, to say the least. But this is not what makes the case so difficult. I think the complexity lies in purely medical side of it.

Most medical cases that end up in court are outliers. We all can probably remember at least one friend or acquaintance who ended up in the "outlier" group and how difficult the diagnosis was.

The group of preemie neonates are all outliers, by default. (This is why, hard as I try, I can't totally blame the doctors in COCH NICU for mistakes because it is a hard work and each case is special.)

However, I would not be able to perform the jury duty in such a case because it requires deep medical knowledge. (Also, the understanding of statistics). How can a random person understand it? They are at the mercy of experts, and the expert in that case was a long-time professional trial witness who hadn't practiced medicine for years, it seems.

I was trying to understand whether there was a trained neonatologist at staff of COCH. There is a difference between a neonatologist and a pediatric hospitalist. (In two words: these very tiny preemies, 21 and 22 weeks, who occasionally survive and make wordlwide headlines, are treated by neonatologists. Not pediatricians). I don't see any biographies of Drs. B, J or G, for example so i don't know what exactly was their training in.

Dr. Shoo Lee is a neonatologist and had a fellowship in neonatology. He founded the Canadian Neonatal Foundation. It is a young profession. Most of his panel are neonatologists. Given that neonatology is a relatively young specialty and much advanced recently, can a regularly trained pediatrician serve as a good neonatologist? Yes. Ultimately, we are all autodidacts. However, people have to take additional time to train and read. (Because it is not enough to just see 29-week-old babies, you have to learn about ventilation settings for them. The most difficult area of medicine, critical care, plus, young preemies, OMG...).

I suspect this is why we see the panel of independent experts being so harsh on the COCH consultants and COCH in general. But, I see two sides to it as well. In Canada, hospitals are good, but differ in quality and level of care too. Easy to say, "such a unit might have been shut down", but in Chester, they have to keep it afloat and workable. I feel sorry for all of them, patients, nurses, doctors.

All in all, a complex situation. I think the true fault ultimately might lie with the CEO and the management who in their time agreed to upgrade the NICU level.

But coming back to Lucy. We don't have the answer. And, we are facing two issues here. One, should she serve the time given that she may have not been guilty in intentionally killing the kids? If two groups of doctors are fighting over who's right, how Is it even possible for laymen to assess whether there was an additional factor in that NICU or not?

The second issue. Let us say that not enough evidence is found to prove malice or intent. (Which I have a feeling that we'll end up with.) That will be enough to let her out of jail. But, Lucy wants to be a nurse. Here, tbh, an issue lies. They can restore her nursing license, they can't make parents or patients trust her. The patient chooses. And guess what?

However. It could be for the better for her. Her stay in prison seems to demonstrate one thing, she is not the leader. Her issues with parents of babies and her choice of "pediatric" branch might be related to own psychological traits. She might benefit from good therapy. I suspect that she's very logical and analytical. She can learn. She might do better in the area where such qualities are needed, earn more and feel happier about herself.

In the meantime, I am trying to educate myself in the medical aspect of each case, each baby.

Once, neonatology sprouted due to advances in IVF. Maybe eventually, the case may give rise to advances in medicine.

 

[Sweeper2000]

I have such strong doubts that it was failures in care that led to the demise and medical emergencies in the cases. All those med files have gone through multiple layers of scrutiny inside and outside of the hospital all utilising professionals no doubt of high degree themselves. At court aside from a few instances there was never any question about the care those babies received. So where does this come from with dr lee and co?

 

[Charlot123]

I have such strong doubts that it was failures in care that led to the demise and medical emergencies in the cases. All those med files have gone through multiple layers of scrutiny inside and outside of the hospital all utilising professionals no doubt of high degree themselves. At court aside from a few instances there was never any question about the care those babies received. So where does this come from with dr lee and co?

OK it is not the newest one but it has it inside.

Lucy Letby: killer or coincidence? Why some experts question the evidence

Exclusive: Doubts raised over safety of convictions of nurse found guilty of murdering babies

www.theguardian.com

“The hospital, worried by the deaths, commissioned a review from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health(RCPCH) in July 2016. It found the unit was very short of nursing staff and that consultants were spread too thinly between the paediatric ward and the neonatal unit.

Junior staff did not feel they could call in consultants, often leaving the unit in the care of mid-grade doctors, many of whom lacked sufficient experience, the review reported.

Doctors were surprised by babies collapsing when they did not expect and dying when they could not explain why.”

JMO but it is everywhere: this was the main mistake of the COCH management. Assigning wrong level to NICU.

NICU took in very premature, very sick babies whose risk of dying was too high and was ill-equipped for that level of care. There were not enough nurses, not enough “doctor doctors”, too many babies per staff, a mixture of babies over 32 weeks and very young preemies; some doctors were interns and ideally, had to be supervised but were they? Happy to discuss cases offline. Least of all I am blaming anyone. Even the situations that are so well-known (Dr. Breary lacerating the liver) are understandable if you consider how tiny these babies were. Intubating preemies is a disaster because of anatomy. Plus, I am trying to understand whether they had a specially trained neonatologists on the unit and I don’t know.

I just think that Lucy taking in more shifts was financially good for her but it also indicates the hopeless situation the hospital found itself in; it was stretched too thin.

Maybe the committee has to also look at the maternity ward. Perhaps something changed there. Also: I googled IVF in Chester (many preemies who were twins or triplets). I thought, maybe there was a new IVF clinic opened around and its practices were subpar? Well, COCH had own https://coch.nhs.uk/all-services/fertility-services.aspx
It is called CARE fertility Chester but links lead nowhere. All CARE IVF clinics in UK were sold in 2022 to another owner.

My question would be, when did CARE open at COCH? It might have been one more independent variable that has not been studied.

ETA: Care Fertility Chester has changed its name to Care Fertility Cheshire and seems that staff has changed too. I think the premises changed as well. But when it opened and when the NICU level at COCH got upgraded is interesting to find out.

There should be nothing non-transparent in this information. I wonder if the whole “package”, Fertility—-> labor——-> NICU underwent some changes around the same time. There might be totally different factors in play; ask why the need to “upgrade” NICU unit first? Logically, there are to be expected more correlation there. IVF practices have drastically changed recently, too, but we need to know what the expectations were in *whenever NICU was upgraded*.

 

[joltz]

thats the dr j whos evidence was called highly unsatisfactory by the Court of apeal being it was largely on false door swipe evdence

Yes Dr Jayaram who gave evidence at the retrial of baby K, where Letby was convicted unanimously by the jury who listened to what both he and Letby had to say on the matter

 

[Furore]

There is no medical proof that she didn’t murder babies - in a way, the medical information is actually only a small part of the reason she was convicted.

Reading the impact statements of the parents is harrowing. It is clear that it was not just deaths, but repeated inexplicable collapses in Letbys care. That at the time, there was no explanation for the death(s). We all have a duty of care to these innocent souls, to investigate the common component of all their deaths and collapses - unfortunately whether we like it or not, that was LL, we know nurses can and do murder children - often for attention and sympathy - and this has all already been examined in months of trial.

It is easy to take each piece of information in isolation and condemn it, but putting together the totality of the evidence, clearly convinced a jury that on balance convicting this person was the wings of justice.

It genuinely makes little sense whatsoever, that every unpredictable collapse and death happened to the same nurse, and that despite post mortems and case reviews at the time, there was still no coherent explanation for the deaths. Those investigating and performing PMs etc were the same ones that do all the other cases in the region (in fact, few child pathologists exist) so why were just the CoC so inexplicable.

These were also medical autopsies not forensic - there is a different burden of differential and signs sought.

People seem to quote the liver damage a lot - but on revising the autopsy findings, the liver was consistent with significant crush or blunt force injury, not needle tracks or penetration, so I am unclear how Shoo Lee’s panel have come to this conclusion, other than setting out to exonerate LL.

Here are victim statements, and these are all the people beyond LL who have suffered and deserved answers - more than us - the media frenzy is around LL, but what it is subjecting these families to is beyond contempt The victims of Lucy Letby – and full statements from their parents

 

[joltz]

they were all under staffed but they were not all taking such serious cases

The unit was doing what it did normally and many of the babies were 32 weeks plus. The survival rate is more than 90%

Where is the evidence that other units "were not taking on such serious cases"

We already know from the trial that many of these babies weren't particularly unwell. Some were so far along that they were being prepared to go home.

We already know from the trial staffing levels and sub optimal cannot account for the deaths and collapses

Did you know that the unit was also averaging one set of triplets per year. There were either 3 or 4 sets from 2013-2016. It was evidenced at Thirlwall. So it wasn't unusual whatsoever.

 

[Furore]

I would also indicate that the case of the German nurse killer, has many similar parallels to LL - including the starting point that collapses and cardiac arrests more than doubled on his shifts. Niels Högel: German ex-nurse admits killing 100 patients - BBC News

Again, even if these collapses and deaths happened purely by chance on LL, as the statisticians might comment, there’s also a perfectly plausible capacity that it wasn’t chance.

 

[Charlot123]

There is no medical proof that she didn’t murder babies - in a way, the medical information is actually only a small part of the reason she was convicted.

Reading the impact statements of the parents is harrowing. It is clear that it was not just deaths, but repeated inexplicable collapses in Letbys care. That at the time, there was no explanation for the death(s). We all have a duty of care to these innocent souls, to investigate the common component of all their deaths and collapses - unfortunately whether we like it or not, that was LL, we know nurses can and do murder children - often for attention and sympathy - and this has all already been examined in months of trial.

It is easy to take each piece of information in isolation and condemn it, but putting together the totality of the evidence, clearly convinced a jury that on balance convicting this person was the wings of justice.

It genuinely makes little sense whatsoever, that every unpredictable collapse and death happened to the same nurse, and that despite post mortems and case reviews at the time, there was still no coherent explanation for the deaths. Those investigating and performing PMs etc were the same ones that do all the other cases in the region (in fact, few child pathologists exist) so why were just the CoC so inexplicable.

These were also medical autopsies not forensic - there is a different burden of differential and signs sought.

People seem to quote the liver damage a lot - but on revising the autopsy findings, the liver was consistent with significant crush or blunt force injury, not needle tracks or penetration, so I am unclear how Shoo Lee’s panel have come to this conclusion, other than setting out to exonerate LL.

Here are victim statements, and these are all the people beyond LL who have suffered and deserved answers - more than us - the media frenzy is around LL, but what it is subjecting these families to is beyond contempt The victims of Lucy Letby – and full statements from their parents

You say, “there is no medical proof”. Sorry, then what are we basing our judgment on? She didn’t even confess. She said she was innocent.

We are basing our judgment on a linear correlation, which can be a logical fallacy.

Linear thinking helps us learn, but also makes us error-prone. The Latin phrase “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” (after that, therefore because of that) is an example of “false clause logical fallacy.” This is what the good doctors did, they linked two factors in a horrible way if untrue (“After Lucy took care of him, a baby died ”, and now it is, “if a baby dies, it is Lucy”.)

This way, they rejected any other contributions, both non-human (e.g., pathogens) and human (themselves). And now they are getting the taste of own medicine in the same linear way (“in Canada, such a unit would be shut down” or “the doctor knows nothing about ventilation”).

How to deal with logical fallacies? I can only think of statistical multivariate regression analysis, where “presence of Lucy” is compared to different predictive outcomes. But go back to 2012, and maybe before when she was in training.

The opposite, when you put in different variables, and see what factors pop out as “important ones” is more complicated, but that’s what statisticians are for. It might give us the answers. Before both analyses are performed, we can’t make any conclusions.

<modsnip - not an approved source>

 

[Marantz4250b]

The second issue. Let us say that not enough evidence is found to prove malice or intent. (Which I have a feeling that we'll end up with.) That will be enough to let her out of jail. But, Lucy wants to be a nurse. Here, tbh, an issue lies. They can restore her nursing license, they can't make parents or patients trust her. The patient chooses. And guess what?

It already has been during the ten month trial and subsequent retrial on one count - hence why she's in prison serving multiple whole life orders.

This inquiry is not - NOT - reexamining her convictions or the evidence presented at trial. That is what courts are for and this is not a court. It is a statutory public inquiry who's terms of reference do not include the question of her guilt. She is never "getting out of jail" as a result of this inquiry.

 

[Charlot123]

The unit was doing what it did normally and many of the babies were 32 weeks plus. The survival rate is more than 90%

Where is the evidence that other units "were not taking on such serious cases"

We already know from the trial that many of these babies weren't particularly unwell. Some were so far along that they were being prepared to go home.

We already know from the trial staffing levels and sub optimal cannot account for the deaths and collapses

Did you know that the unit was also averaging one set of triplets per year. There were either 3 or 4 sets from 2013-2016. It was evidenced at Thirlwall. So it wasn't unusual whatsoever.

OK, but Lucy was on the unit since 2012. And at that time, there were no excessive deaths.

Now, to contradict myself, maybe she was not taking as many shifts before. But Lucy taking more shifts would be the indication of “understaffing”, and “understaffing” could cause excessive deaths per se.

BTW, I was thinking, could there be such a thing as Lucy being an asymptomatic carrier of some bacteria or virus that could have presented an additional risk to the neonates? The list is so huge. She had cats, too. One never knows. There are many questions that might be asked about this case. All that we have to answer is that she didn’t intentionally kill babies. The chance of her being an asymptomatic carrier one can weigh in.

 

[Charlot123]

It already has been during the ten month trial and subsequent retrial on one count - hence why she's in prison serving multiple whole life orders.

This inquiry is not - NOT - reexamining her convictions or the evidence presented at trial. That is what courts are for and this is not a court. It is a statutory public inquiry who's terms of reference do not include the question of her guilt. She is never "getting out of jail" as a result of this inquiry.

I suspect there will be a reexamination, though.

 

[Marantz4250b]

OK, but Lucy was on the unit since 2012. And at that time, there were no excessive deaths.

Now, to contradict myself, maybe she was not taking as many shifts before. But Lucy taking more shifts would be the indication of “understaffing”, and “understaffing” could cause excessive deaths per se.

BTW, I was thinking, could there be such a thing as Lucy being an asymptomatic carrier of some bacteria or virus that could have presented an additional risk to the neonates? The list is so huge. She had cats, too. One never knows. There are many questions that might be asked about this case. All that we have to answer is that she didn’t intentionally kill babies. The chance of her being an asymptomatic carrier one can weigh in.

This is just getting more and more into the realms of the unrealistic; I mean, yes, she probably could be but if that was a reasonable likelihood then surely the defence would have investigated that possibility?

Also, what diseases are out there which can be carried asymptomatically which, coincidentally (conveniently) only manifest in pre-term babies, only whilst the carrier is the only other human nearby and which often disappear leaving no trace when resus is performed?

With the greatest of respect, what you appear to be doing here is simply looking for random answers which might make her innocent rather than actually looking at the evidence we currently have and weighing that against guilt or innocence. Conformation bias, essentially.That is not the way that murder investigations are carried out.

 

[Marantz4250b]

I suspect there will be a reexamination, though.

Not at Thirlwell there won't be. It does not have the power to do that

​

On 21 August 2023, after a trial at Manchester Crown Court, Lucy Letby was sentenced to life imprisonment and a whole life order on each of 7 counts of murder and 7 counts of attempted murder. The offences took place at the Countess of Chester Hospital, part of the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Thirlwall Inquiry: terms of reference

www.gov.uk

Terms of reference​

The inquiry will investigate 3 broad areas:

A. The experiences of the Countess of Chester Hospital and other relevant NHS services, of all the parents of the babies named in the indictment.

B. The conduct of those working at the Countess of Chester Hospital, including the board, managers, doctors, nurses and midwives with regard to the actions of Lucy Letby while she was employed there as a neonatal nurse and subsequently, including:

(i) whether suspicions should have been raised earlier, whether Lucy Letby should have been suspended earlier and whether the police and other external bodies should have been informed sooner of suspicions about her

(ii) the responses to concerns raised about Lucy Letby from those with management responsibilities within the trust

(iii) whether the trust’s culture, management and governance structures and processes contributed to the failure to protect babies from Lucy Letby

C. The effectiveness of NHS management and governance structures and processes, external scrutiny and professional regulation in keeping babies in hospital safe and well looked after, whether changes are necessary and, if so, what they should be, including how accountability of senior managers should be strengthened. This section will include a consideration of NHS culture.

A non-exhaustive list of questions arising out of the terms of reference is set out in the annex.

Nothing in there allows the inquiry to examine her convictions.

 

[Tortoise]

<RSBM> when the NICU level at COCH got upgraded is interesting to find out.

There should be nothing non-transparent in this information. I wonder if the whole “package”, Fertility—-> labor——-> NICU underwent some changes around the same time. There might be totally different factors in play; ask why the need to “upgrade” NICU unit first? Logically, there are to be expected more correlation there. IVF practices have drastically changed recently, too, but we need to know what the expectations were in *whenever NICU was upgraded*.

RSBM & BBM

Please provide links for the upgrade you refer to.

 

[joltz]

OK, but Lucy was on the unit since 2012. And at that time, there were no excessive deaths.

Now, to contradict myself, maybe she was not taking as many shifts before. But Lucy taking more shifts would be the indication of “understaffing”, and “understaffing” could cause excessive deaths per se.

BTW, I was thinking, could there be such a thing as Lucy being an asymptomatic carrier of some bacteria or virus that could have presented an additional risk to the neonates? The list is so huge. She had cats, too. One never knows. There are many questions that might be asked about this case. All that we have to answer is that she didn’t intentionally kill babies. The chance of her being an asymptomatic carrier one can weigh in.

So she was inadvertently causing the babies deaths through a bacteria passed through Tigger and Smudge. Come on, seriously?

Letby was on the unit since 2012, yes, but she only gained the qualification to actually work with high dependency babies a couple of weeks before the death of baby A in 2015 Before this Letby did not have access to high dependency babies or the IV lines. That's quite significant. Once she completed the QIS qualification, babies started suffering unexpected collapses after Letby entered their orbit.

 

[Charlot123]

This is just getting more and more into the realms of the unrealistic; I mean, yes, she probably could be but if that was a reasonable likelihood then surely the defence would have investigated that possibility?

Also, what diseases are out there which can be carried asymptomatically which, coincidentally (conveniently) only manifest in pre-term babies, only whilst the carrier is the only other human nearby and which often disappear leaving no trace when resus is performed?

With the greatest of respect, what you appear to be doing here is simply looking for random answers which might make her innocent rather than actually looking at the evidence we currently have and weighing that against guilt or innocence. Conformation bias, essentially.That is not the way that murder investigations are carried out.

I am not impressed by her first defense, tbh.

What I am trying to do is offer more plausible explanations than “she is a killer”. In fact, maybe throw a life jacket to drs. B@E, not that they need it but "a murderer on the unit" sounds strange. I am trying to offer fact-based versions, and we are entitled to opinions. I can stop, though and go back - to that damning verdict of the panel of fourteen independent experts. Their opinion matters. The fact that a real, trained, experienced neonatologist struggles to unattach his name from this case is honestly, telling. Think of it. Dr. Lee dedicated his life to saving babies. Imagine how glad he'd feel if his early study helped catch a prolific killer of the babies, protected the babies from the killer? Does it happen? No. An eminent scientist is horrified of being linked to LL’s case.

RSBM & BBM

Please provide links for the upgrade you refer to.

It is not a link. All i know from following the case earlier is that NICU has been downgraded to 32 weeks and older approximately at the time when Lucy was moved from it. That is officially a lower acuity unit. And before, the unit would accept younger preemies, baby K was 29.5 weeks. So the practice to accept preemies younger than 32 weeks, when did it officially start in COCH NICU?

 

[Marantz4250b]

I am not impressed by her first defense, tbh.

What I am trying to do is offer more plausible explanations than “she is a killer”. In fact, maybe throw a life jacket to drs. B@E, not that they need it but "a murderer on the unit" sounds strange. I am trying to offer fact-based versions, and we are entitled to opinions. I can stop, though and go back - to that damning verdict of the panel of fourteen independent experts. Their opinion matters. The fact that a real, trained, experienced neonatologist struggles to unattach his name from this case is honestly, telling. Think of it. Dr. Lee dedicated his life to saving babies. Imagine how glad he'd feel if his early study helped catch a prolific killer of the babies, protected the babies from the killer? Does it happen? No. An eminent scientist is horrified of being linked to LL’s case.


It is not a link. All i know from following the case earlier is that NICU has been downgraded to 32 weeks and older approximately at the time when Lucy was moved from it. That is officially a lower acuity unit. And before, the unit would accept younger preemies, baby K was 29.5 weeks. So the practice to accept preemies younger than 32 weeks, when did it officially start in COCH NICU?

Neither were the jury, clearly!

There are a plethora of "plausible" explanations either way - they were examined in a ten month trial, one of the longest in UK criminal legal history, and then a retrial on one of the counts. She was convicted and is serving multiple WLO's.

It is, imo, highly disingenuous to refer to what the panel said as being a "verdict". That is to give it way too much credence. That panel is not a court and their statements have not been examined by a court or been afforded any independent legal scrutiny. They are paid medical professionals who have been gathered to write a report on behalf of LL's defence. Nothing more. Even using the word "experts" is disingenuous as it supposes that they would be accepted as such by a court and that is in no way certain.

 

[Furore]

You say, “there is no medical proof”. Sorry, then what are we basing our judgment on? She didn’t even confess. She said she was innocent.

We are basing our judgment on a linear correlation, which can be a logical fallacy.

Linear thinking helps us learn, but also makes us error-prone. The Latin phrase “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” (after that, therefore because of that) is an example of “false clause logical fallacy.” This is what the good doctors did, they linked two factors in a horrible way if untrue (“After Lucy took care of him, a baby died ”, and now it is, “if a baby dies, it is Lucy”.)

This way, they rejected any other contributions, both non-human (e.g., pathogens) and human (themselves). And now they are getting the taste of own medicine in the same linear way (“in Canada, such a unit would be shut down” or “the doctor knows nothing about ventilation”).

How to deal with logical fallacies? I can only think of statistical multivariate regression analysis, where “presence of Lucy” is compared to different predictive outcomes. But go back to 2012, and maybe before when she was in training.

The opposite, when you put in different variables, and see what factors pop out as “important ones” is more complicated, but that’s what statisticians are for. It might give us the answers. Before both analyses are performed, we can’t make any conclusions.

<modsnip - not an approved source>

I would recommend reading a book by British Forensic Pathologist Richard Shepherd - “Unnatural Causes” and the “Seven Ages of Death”, which sets out far more eloquently than I can, why it’s difficult to be certain about causes of death and identifying foul play.

We live in an era where people demand black and white, and certainty. The difficulty with air embolism, is it doesn’t leave much in the way of post mortem findings, there is no blood test etc … air can be reabsorbed from the blood stream. Medicine really is art as much as science unfortunately. The give away IMHO is the suddeness and refractoriness of the child collapses and deaths, that didn’t behave like normal collapses and deaths, unexplained by conventional post mortems and case reviews.

So yes, medical evidence is just part of this trial; and why the new expert panel stating no evidence of air embolism etc, is not particularly novel…JMO.

I think multiple layers of investigation went in at the time, to finding a superbug, equipment failure - any realm of other possibilities - the idea that it would be a serial killer versus any one of these common and diagnosable issues - took a long time to reach and consider - parents were contacted YEARS later. When you’ve exhausted those possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth as per Sherlock. Naturally everyone is entitled to their own opinion on this. For me, healthy babies, ready to nearly go home, don’t inexplicably collapse and die almost relentlessly on the same individual - always when alone with an individual - in unique and unexplainable ways - many times more than their usual rate, and the insulin poisoning in babies not prescribed insulin, is kind of the main smoking gun.

 

[Tortoise]

It is not a link. All i know from following the case earlier is that NICU has been downgraded to 32 weeks and older approximately at the time when Lucy was moved from it. That is officially a lower acuity unit. And before, the unit would accept younger preemies, baby K was 29.5 weeks. So the practice to accept preemies younger than 32 weeks, when did it officially start in COCH NICU?

So there is no source for you referring to it as if it is a fact that the unit had been upgraded.

There is no information that the unit was ever upgraded, as far as I am aware, it was providing intensive care cots from when LL qualified, and mortality figures for comparison were produced right back to 2010, which they wouldn't have done if the unit wasn't offering comparable services, IMO.

It wasn't ever a NICU (level 3), it was a level 2 unit prior to being downgraded to level 1. Level 2 (LNU) provides intensive care on a short term basis, amongst other factors such as birth weight and gestation.

In actual fact baby K was born at 24 weeks and 6 days gestation, because there was no time to transfer the mother who was already in labour.

All of this information is here on past threads, and the media thread, and lots more background information can be found at the Thirlwall Inquiry website, and it needs to be appreciated fully, including the wealth of expert medical and circumstantial evidence that was assessed by the juries over the best part of a year, before considering what was said at the press conference of McDonald and Dr Lee. Misinformation is a complete waste of time and does not assist anybody in discussing the case.

MOO