Countess of Chester Hospital

And the concrete-headed, pig-headed stupidity of officialdom in the face of inconvenient facts has never astounded me since, though it continues to infuriate me.

I have been amazed by the report produced by Lady Justice Thirlwall on the Letby case, and I've also been appalled by the reactions of some parts of the media and some parts of the political world to it, as if you could actually continue to insist That there was no doubt at all that Lucy Letby was a mad witch who patrolled the wards of the Countess of Chester Hospital killing babies for no discernible reason and in no way connected with anything she'd ever done before and in ways which nobody has ever been able to establish that she did it and which nobody ever saw.

So an enormous, what is it, 18 million pound inquiry predicated on this, how should I say, questionable assumption continued to trundle on like a steamroller, crushing like hedgehogs any suggestion by anybody that this might not be a good idea and ignoring pleas from Ms. Letbe's increasing army of defenders to hold hard and at one stage to wait at least Until the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which is examining the case, came up with its answer.

You shouldn't do any of those things.

A 772-page report.

It says there was a complete failure to protect babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital, but it doesn't question Letby's guilt.

Still pending is a decision by the Criminal Cases Review Commission into whether Lucy Letby's case should be looked at again.

There's obviously a lot of interest in this in New Zealand based on the sheer number of people who've accessed our previous conversations online.

It's very unusual and at the moment I don't understand what the reasons are.

Yes, I guess we will in due course.

But the review of what happened at the Countess of Chester Hospital, this review by Lady Justice Catherine Thirlwall, it's highlighted a number of missed opportunities for the bosses at the hospital to intervene after doctors raised the alarm about a whole lot of unexplained deaths on the neonatal unit.

The review, though... has been called useless in your media.

But she's always maintained her innocence.

And, you know, these killings occurred while she was working in the Countess of Chester Hospital.

And this is the thing that surprised me, where she worked between 2015 and 2016.

For some reason, even though I watched the true crime doco, I thought it was spread over just a few more years.

It's a shocking story of leadership failure.

The inquiry was established after Lucy Lettby had been convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven more at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Its job was to discover how she'd been allowed to do it, not whether she had.

That distinction has become increasingly important today.

That's right, Alex.

In a report probing how Lucy Letby was able to commit her crimes, Lady Justice Thirlwall found that there had been a complete failure at all levels to invoke safeguarding procedure at the Countess of Chester Hospital and concluded that some of the babies would have survived and some attacks prevented had action come earlier.

Families were failed twice over, the report says.

Thirlwall said parents were kept in the dark for years about concerns that their babies may have been deliberately harmed, calling the treatment reprehensible.

Morning, Nick.

The findings of this inquiry are that there was a complete failure to protect babies on the neonatal units at the Countess of Chester Hospital.

Lady Justice Thirlwall found at least two, potentially three babies could have survived and other collapses could have been avoided if the hospital had acted on concerns about Lucy Letby.

Ultimately, safeguarding failures were right at the heart of it.