Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has said officials will “urgently develop plans” to introduce live-streaming cameras on England’s baby wards after an inquiry into Lucy Letby’s murders and attempted murders.
Inquiry chair Lady Justice Thirlwall called for a series of urgent reforms to neonatal units, including CCTV for all cots and incubators, and restricting access to insulin.
Thirlwall said some of the babies Letby killed could have been saved if managers at the Countess of Chester Hospital had taken action earlier.
Her report criticises a “complete failure to protect babies” and a “profound failure of management, governance and safeguarding” at the hospital.
Thirlwall said this was because “no one seems to have understood that safeguarding action is required when a member of staff is suspected of causing deliberate harm and does not require colleagues to be sure of guilt.”
She said it would never be possible to know exactly how many lives could have been saved if safeguarding procedures had been properly followed.
One of the senior doctors who tried to raise concerns about Letby with hospital managers, consultant paediatrician Dr John Gibbs, now retired, told the BBC the Thirlwall Inquiry report was “grim reading”.
In a rare interview he said he accepted that consultants must bear “collective” responsibility for some of the failings identified in the report, and said he wished they had been “brave enough to follow our suspicions and escalate things to the police earlier”.
Chief executive and registrar at the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC), Paul Rees, said he was “truly sorry for the NMC’s failings” in the Letby case and that “we also did not act quickly enough to suspend Lucy Letby”.
