Church and medicine often guilty of the same failings

Once again, reputation protection was deemed more important than victims and survivors, writes David Quinn

This week, nurse Lucy Letby found out that she will spend the rest of her life behind bars. She was found guilty of the murder of seven babies in her care at the Countess of Chester hospital in Britain. She attempted to kill others.

Her killing spree began in June 2015 and ended a year later. Doctors at the hospital tried to raise concerns about what was happening in her ward but when they complained to management, management was more concerned with possible reputational damage to the hospital if police were involved. Reputation protection was deemed more important than patient protection.

Management actually turned on the doctors and rallied around Ms Letby, seeing her as the real victim.

Unfortunately, this is all too reminiscent of the Church and how it responded to child sex abuse allegations. Reputation was put first, and the priest-abusers were often seen as the ‘victims’ of their impulses, and sent off for treatment, although in the case of Ms Letby, management did not consider her guilty at all.

Ms Letby, as many have noted, is the prototypal sweet and innocent looking person, the ‘butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth’ type.

Her upbringing appears to have been wholly conventional. Those looking for clues as to why she embarked on her killing spree can find no real clues in her past.

Personality

She was only 25 when she murdered her first victim. She worked in the neonatal unit of her hospital and colleagues certainly didn’t spot anything overly odd about her personality. “She was like Little Miss Perfect”, a former friend told a newspaper. “Maybe slightly awkward but sociable. She is literally the last person anyone would suspect as a killer”.

Just about the only thing that stood out about her behaviour was her close relationship with a married registrar, but this can hardly be taken as a predictor that someone was about to become a killer or there would be a lot more killers in the world than there are.

Her first killing took place on June 8, 2015. Twins had been born six weeks premature, which is well within the capacity of modern medicine to manage.

Both babies were healthy. Ms Letby injected a fatal amount of air into ‘Child A’s’ bloodstream, killing him.

A little over a day later, she tried to kill his twin in the same way, but this time staff were able to save the baby’s life.

She killed other babies by injecting them with milk or insulin.

By the time her killing spree came to an end, she had murdered seven infants and attempted to murder six others, some of whom were left permanently disabled.

Doctors began to raise the alarm within a few months of the first death because the number of babies dying was unusually high and the common denominator each time an infant died was the presence of Ms Letby on the ward.

But when they brought their concerns to hospital management, they were rebuffed. An interesting aspect of the case is that to some extent it became a matter internally of doctors vs nurses.

For example, the chief executive of the hospital who was dealing with the complaints against Ms Letby was a former nurse.

One nurse complained that doctors were leading a ‘witch-hunt’ against Ms Letby. Royal College of Nursing union representatives took her side.

Doctors were warned not to contact the police because that would mean “blue tape everywhere and the end of the unit as well as the trust’s reputation”.

At one point, Ms Letby actually made a bullying complaint against the doctors who were trying to have her investigated and amazingly, this succeeded.

By this point, the doctors had succeeded in having her removed from the unit where she was working

Grievance

The subsequent grievance inquiry turned on the doctors and Ms Letby was told, “this behaviour has resulted in you, a junior colleague and fellow professional, feeling isolated and vulnerable, putting your reputation in question. This in unacceptable and could be viewed as victimisation”.

On top of this, she was offered a placement at the world-famous Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool and support for a master’s degree or advanced nurse training.

The inquiry raised no red flags about her behaviour when on duty.

To cut a long story short, the doctors persisted with their concerns, and finally hospital management called in the police in May 2017.

Ms Letby was arrested two months later. In her home, police found pieces of paper written by her saying, “I don’t deserve to live. I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough. I am a horrible evil person”, and in capital letters, “I AM EVIL I DID THIS”.

Perhaps this goes to the heart of it. Sometimes a person is not malformed by their background and any other event in their life. They are not suffering from severe mental health difficulties. They are simply motivated by evil and maybe this was the case with Ms Letby.

Not the first

She is not the first and only nurse in Britain to act in this way. Another was Beverley Allitt, who was given 13 life sentences in 1993. She also injected babies with insulin and air.

She had attacked 13 babies over a 59-day period, killing four of them. Like Ms Letby, she was only in her 20s when she conducted her killing spree. She is still serving time in prison and is now age 54.

No proper explanation was ever found for her behaviour either.

The history of medicine is, in fact, riddled with scandals and cover-ups, rather like the history of the Church. The intentions of medicine are excellent, and it is an indispensable part of life, but sometimes it attracts bad or incompetent people and can be run by a hierarchy more concerned with reputation protection and promotion rather than anything else.

Doctors, as well as nurses, have deliberately killed people, or sexually abused patients, or covered up their own malpractice and been assisted in this by colleagues. Doctors have conducted highly unethical, sometimes murderous, medical experiments and trials. They have presided over torture. They have worked in concentration camps and assisted in eugenics, which includes involuntary sterilisation of patients. The list goes on.

Human nature
Unfortunately, we see that every human endeavour is subject to the same human weaknesses, frailties and sometimes downright evil because human nature is bad as well as good, just as Christianity teaches.

Everything we do is in constant need of renewal and reform and vigilance so that our failures don’t overwhelm and corrupt systems and fail people, especially those they are intended to serve.

The Church, above all, should never forget this, and neither, as we can see, should the world of medicine.