Context
Dr Elizabeth Newby, consultant paediatrician, gave extensive Thirlwall Inquiry evidence on the consultants’ 2016 escalation and on the specific sequence that led to her being required to sign an apology letter to Letby.
Key passages
“Impersonal” management, and a lost seat at the table. Asked about the paediatric department being moved out of Women and Children’s and into the Urgent Care Division, Dr Newby said the change gave paediatrics “less of a voice at the table higher up” because the department had “got swallowed — that’s not really the right word, but swallowed up into Urgent and Planned Care”. Contrasting the Countess with her later post at Stockport, she said the higher management tiers there “didn’t feel welcoming” and that senior managers “seemed perhaps a bit detached and not visible”, a culture she described elsewhere in her evidence, in her own word, as “impersonal”.
The debrief that never happened. After Child D died, Dr Newby said she tried to arrange a debrief for staff but that “it was impossible to get everybody together, for everybody’s shifts patterns to align and it didn’t and it never came together”. Asked how important a debrief would have been, she said: “It’s definitely — without a doubt it is good practice to have a debrief it allows people that — a safe space after an event to — to offload a little bit because it’s — you know, these events are very traumatic.”
“She was always there.” Describing the conversation that followed Child I’s collapse in October 2015, Dr Newby said: “I was asked if Letby had been there on the night that I was called in to that resuscitation and I replied that I had seen her.” She said the discussion that followed centred on the fact that “she was always on duty when these events had happened”, while colleagues also raised “counter arguments that we were in fact a very small unit with a very small pool of nursing staff”. She said: “I felt the idea that anyone was suggesting that someone was doing this quite difficult”. Later in her evidence, describing the mood at the time, she added: “No one had ever seen anything, heard anything.”
Reflecting on how the doctors and nurses divided. Looking back on the way suspicion developed, Dr Newby said: “If we had just perhaps taken a step back and reported the — and reported the incident rather than trying to work out who had done it, if you like”, concern might not have hardened into confrontation. Instead, she said, “it became sort of an almost adversarial thing that the doctors were accusing the nurses and everyone was sort of digging in their position”.