Context
Dr Matthew Neame, consultant paediatrician, gave Thirlwall Inquiry evidence covering the cluster period and the consultants’ collective escalation.
Key ground
Dr Neame’s second rotation at the Countess, September 2015 to March 2016, followed six months of neonatology training at the tertiary Liverpool Women’s Hospital, a Level 3 unit that took more premature and more unwell babies than the Countess’s Level 2 service. He said that before he started, he had heard reports of the neonatal team having “a bad time”, understood to mean babies who had “died or required unexpected escalations of care”, but recalled no speculation at the time about a cause — only an assumption that “that was bad luck and a bad — a bad run”. He described the staffing pressures he found there as “very typical of the pressures that I have encountered at other organisations”.
He was directly involved in the resuscitation of Child H in September 2015 and of Child I on consecutive nights in October, and said it was understood among his fellow trainees “ that it had been a surprisingly busy period” in terms of collapses and deaths. Of Child H specifically he said: “I did not have any concerns that Child H’s collapse had a suspicious cause”, adding that he was “not aware of any colleagues who may have had suspicions about the cause of Child H’s collapse”. Asked whether he connected what he had heard before starting to what he was now experiencing, he said: “No, I didn’t see those events as being associated.”