Alison Kelly, the head of safeguarding at the Countess of Chester Hospital where nurse Lucy Letby killed seven babies and tried to kill seven others, has testified before the Thirlwall Inquiry, which is investigating how Letby was able to commit these crimes. Kelly, who was director of nursing and executive lead for safeguarding at the time, accepted that she had not escalated concerns about Letby, despite being told by senior consultant Dr Stephen Brearey in May 2016 that there were concerns about Letby’s links to unexplained deaths on the unit.
Although Kelly did eventually submit a safeguarding referral to the local safeguarding board in March 2018, she told the inquiry that the concerns raised by doctors were “hearsay”. Barrister Nicholas de la Poer KC asked Kelly why she did not report these concerns to NHS England in July 2016, to which Kelly replied that the decision not to do so “was a really fine balance”. When Mr de la Poer asked if she was “deliberately” trying to “withhold” information about someone possibly harming babies, Kelly insisted that the actions she did take were “done with good intentions”.
Although Kelly accepted that, in retrospect, it was a safeguarding issue and she should have treated it as such, she placed some of the onus for this on her colleagues, stating “I take my duties very, very seriously… but I was still relying on the teams from the unit upwards to bring any safeguarding concerns to me and nobody did”.
Kelly’s safeguarding referral was submitted almost a year after Cheshire Police were first called to investigate unexplained deaths and collapses in the unit. She acknowledged that the referral was “not detailed enough”. The inquiry heard that Letby was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others, including two attempts on one infant, between June 2015 and June 2016, and is serving 15 whole life sentences
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