Context
Karen Rees was Head of Nursing for Urgent Care and the on-call duty manager on the night of 23 June 2016, when consultants demanded that Letby be removed from the neonatal unit mid-shift. Her Thirlwall Inquiry evidence addresses that specific night and the escalation chain.
Key passages
Her role and reliance on Eirian Powell. Karen Rees told the Inquiry she became head of nursing over neonates and paediatrics despite having no prior nursing experience in those areas — “I never had any nursing experience” on the unit — and that she relied heavily on senior nurses, “predominately Eirian Lloyd Powell and Anne Murphy”, to interpret what she was being shown. Asked what should happen if there was mere suspicion that a baby had been deliberately harmed by a staff member, she said it “should have warranted an immediate investigation”, with the safeguarding team brought in to assess whether a further “deep dive” was needed.
The “staff trend” and moving Letby to days. Shown an email from Alison Kelly warning that “if there is a staff trend here, we have already changed her shift patterns because of this” and calling it “potentially very serious”, Ms Rees was asked about Eirian Powell’s decision to restrict Letby to day shifts. She said she was told it was “a neutral act to bring her on to days. It wasn’t deemed as a punishment or a finger-pointing exercise”, but rather a way to check Letby’s competencies with more staff available to supervise her.
A missed opportunity. Ms Rees told the Inquiry that neither consultant approached her directly when their suspicions about Letby first arose: “At no time did either Consultant bleep, telephone, knock on my office door to tell me about their concerns”. Reflecting on this, she said that she and Eirian Powell could have “worked closely and perhaps that would have prevented the divide between the clinicians and the nurses and the lack of trust moving forward”. She agreed, however, that Dr Brearey did telephone her on the night of 24 June, when the allegation was put to her in the clearest terms.
Her September 2016 email. Counsel put to Ms Rees an email she sent to Alison Kelly on 9 September 2016 objecting to a decision to delay Letby’s return to the unit, in which she wrote: “The decision to delay transfer back to the NNU. In my opinion this decision is wrong and immoral based on a senior clinician having a gut feeling with no evidence except that LL has been present at a number of these neonatal deaths”. She told the Inquiry she had been “emotional and frustrated” at the time, having witnessed Letby, in her recollection, crying and saying “why are they doing this to me, I have done nothing wrong?”
Calling the police. Asked how the truth was ever going to be determined, Ms Rees said: “It needed to be — to call the police clearly because we weren’t getting anywhere, with no amount of investigations, internal/external thematic reviews, post-mortems whatever, it wasn’t moving anything on. So, yes, the only way we could determine was to bring the police in”. Asked whether it was the responsibility of everyone involved to call the police as soon as suspicions arose, she agreed: “Yes, and I hold my hand up to that as well”.
What to read alongside this
See our profile of Karen Rees. The 30 June 2016 entry on the timeline covers the events that followed that shift.