SUSPICIOUS DOCTORS AT LUCY LETBY'S HOSPITAL 'DISMISSED AS COMPLAINERS'
Suspicious doctors at the hospital where Lucy Letby carried out her year-long killing spree were dismissed as 'just a bunch of complaining consultants', one of them claimed in court.
NHS bosses are alleged to have put the reputation of the Countess of Chester Hospital above mounting evidence that they had a serial killer on their payroll and spoke of a fear of 'blue and white' police tape.
Rather than act on the consultants' fears, they took Letby's side and found in her favour when she launched a grievance procedure against the NHS trust.
In evidence at Manchester Crown Court, Dr Ravi Jayaram, the unit's lead consultant, said he wished he'd had the courage to go to police rather than rely on his superiors at board level to take action.
Speaking during Letby's trial for the attempted murder of a child known as Baby K, Dr Jayaram claimed there was a culture within the NHS aimed at preventing him and a group of fellow clinicians from becoming whistleblowers.
'People didn't want to listen to us or to acknowledge problems,' he told the jury. 'There was a strategy to keep us quiet.
'Had I phoned the police they would have spoken to the chief executive and he would have told them to 'ignore them, they're just a bunch of complaining consultants'.
'Maybe if I'd had the courage I could have called the police and said 'I think there's a nurse killing babies', but (at the time) I trusted in an adherence to systems and process.
'We spent a long time running into brick walls. I guess we put faith in our medical leaders at senior leadership level.
'It's a matter of enormous regret to us that we didn't do it. If I knew then what I know now, I think we would have found different ways to escalate things'.
Dr Jayaram made his comments during an intense and often ill-tempered exchange with Letby's barrister, Ben Myers KC.
At one point he suggested he and his colleagues had no training in alerting police over such issues. Mr Myers retorted: 'It doesn't take training to ring the police'.
The medic responded by saying: 'But what would have happened was the police would have rung the hospital and been told 'Don't worry about these people, we've got it in hand.
'All we were asking of our leadership was how to do the right thing. It's not just a question of ringing 999'.
Mr Myers, who had been questioning him about the collapse of Baby K on February 17, 2016, claimed he had not called the police because at that time he had 'not seen anything worthy of telling the police'.
He had exaggerated the situation simply to make things appear worse for Letby.
Dr Jayaram rejected the accusation, but agreed that by the time of Baby K's collapse he had begun to 'think the unthinkable' - that Letby was a killer.
He recalled feeling 'uncomfortable' about Letby being alone with Baby K in Nursery 1 and walked in to reassure himself. He found the nurse standing over the infant's incubator doing nothing and with the alarms not sounding. Nor had she shouted for help.
He said of his mindset at the time: 'The thought had occurred to us of unnatural events. It was an uncomfortable thought. You don't really want to go there. I'll be honest, I didn't want it to be that. The only reason I walked in was to prove that I was being ridiculous'.
Mr Myers rejected this, saying: 'But you believed she may have been deliberately harming babies. You've got her, haven't you? You'd caught her as good as red-handed.'
The medic said that at the time his priority had been to stabilise the baby. It was only later that he came to the conclusion that Letby must have deliberately dislodged the infant's ET tube.
Baby K died three days later after being transferred to Arrowe Park Hospital, the Wirral, Merseyside. The prosecution did not allege that Letby was responsible for her death.
Dr Jayaram said that in the ensuing months he and his consultant colleagues had raised their concerns about Baby K's collapse at the Countess, just as they had done in the cases of other babies on the unit.
But they were told it would be 'wrong' for the police to be contacted, and they felt 'the fear of retribution from the people above'.
'As a group we had concerns about deliberate harm being caused. There was no response until, I think, late May (2016) when we attended a meeting. The conclusion of that meeting was 'no action needed'.'
Dr Jayaram said that the week after the the deaths of two triplet boys in late June 2016 the consultants had met as a group and decided they needed to do something.
'The decision was taken that we'd make representations to the executive board. One of the actions was to reduce the status of the hospital so we wouldn't take babies below 32 weeks, and we were also raised our discomfort about Lucy Letby working on the unit.
'That meeting took place about 10 days after the triplets'.
Pressed again on why he had not rung the police, he replied: 'We were explicitly told it would be absolutely wrong for us to go to the police, because it would be bad for the reputation of the trust and there would be blue and white tape everywhere'.
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