NHS trust - Senior doctors forced to apologise to Letby for raising concerns

Lucy Letby's colleagues were ordered to apologise to her after repeatedly raising concerns that the nurse may have been behind a series of unexplained baby deaths, the Guardian has learned.

- Josh Halliday

Senior doctors had warned for months that Letby was the only staff member present during the sudden collapses and deaths of a number of premature babies on the Countess of Chester hospital's neonatal unit.

She was not removed from the ward until early July 2016 - a year after a doctor first alerted a hospital executive to a potential link. By that time she had murdered seven babies and attempted to kill another six, a court found.

Hospital executives ordered a formal review into the spike in deaths in June 2016, a year after Letby's killings began. Letby was removed from the unit the following month, and the police were not contacted for almost another year after that.

After the conclusion of the 10-month trial, a Guardian investigation based on new documents, interviews with hospital consultants and reporting from the trial, has found that:

According to two consultant paediatricians, in July 2016 a hospital executive said contacting the police would damage the hospital's reputation and turn the neonatal unit into a crime scene, after one senior doctor recommended bringing in criminal investigators.

Another executive, Tony Chambers, then the hospital's chief executive, instructed senior doctors to write a letter of apology to Letby on 26 January 2017 for raising concerns about her. The apology was ordered on the basis of two external reviews, which executives felt exonerated Letby. However, neither was designed to examine whether she was responsible for the deaths and both recommended that several fatalities be investigated further.

Doctors were told in early 2017 that Letby's parents had threatened to refer them to the General Medical Council following her removal from the unit, according to internal documents.