Is Lucy Letby Innocent?

 

Why is it only now that the question has entered the mainstream media that Lucy Letby might be innocent? Her trial is complete and now all that's left is for her to live out her life behind bars. This will not be a happy life. She will need to be held in permanent solitary confinement because HMP Bronzefield is home to some very mean bitches and some of them are mothers. How will they regard a woman who kills babies? What would they do to her if they caught her? Therefore if a mistake has been made it is very important that it be corrected. To be fair, a few journalists have raised questions previously about the neonatal nurse from Cheshire, such as Peter Hitchens, see below, but these were largely curtailed. It is possible publicity has only increased now because the end of her trial has lead to reporting restrictions being lifted. These restrictions are unfortunately indispensable so that the public, and therefore the jury, could not claim to be biased about her case. The downside of that is that the government, police and judiciary have a monopoly on the narrative given to the media and therefore said public. Lucy Letby graduated with a nursing degree in 2011 and began her service at the Liverpool Women's Hospital before moving to the Countess of Cheshire Hospital. She was determined to be a paediatric or neonatal intensive care nurse and she trained hard to qualify in that discipline. She once told people that general nursing was boring. Investigations began with typical NHS passive aggression and dithering; in 2015 a group of consultants "asked" the nursing officer to "move" Letby to a non-clinical role. She was transferred to a patient liaison team. Naturally it is a sad fact of life that in a neonatology unit (At OxRad this was called a SCBU, Special Care Baby Unit; usually pronounced "skuh-boo") babies are going to die regularly. They are often born prematurely and so cannot breathe by themselves or digest food. However, that particular unit had always experienced an average of two to three deaths per year; yet in a single month, June 2015, they suffered three. A fourth baby nearly died with a similar pathology to the other three, but was happily saved. There was another death the following month. Then the head paediatrician of the unit noticed that there was a single common factor; Letby had been on duty for all of them. This could have been a coincidence; after all she was known to put in a lot of overtime. The Trust board and Quality Care Commission rejected concerns on this basis. A year later following a number of other unexplained deaths the doctors once again petitioned the board for action, but the board refused. Interestingly once of their concerns was for the Countess of Cheshire's reputation, the very thing they used to dismiss me, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/01/ten-years-on.html. Following a fresh investigation by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, they concluded that the anomalous increase in deaths existed but had no obvious cause and therefore management could not be blamed. Around the same time Letby won an official grievance for being taken off the unit and was returned to frontline clinical care, this time at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool. Her accusers among the Countess neonatal team were ordered to write her a letter of apology. The police were first called in April 2017 and they immediately set up an undercover investigation to establish the cause of the deaths on the Countess neonatal ITU called "Operation Hummingbird". Eventually, after more than two and a half years since the spotlight of suspicion first shone on her, Lucy Letby was arrested. The irony is not lost on me that the decision to begin investigations against me took just eight days. The police found some personal journals in which she expressed negative and aggressive emotions. These included the words: "I am evil! I did this! I killed them on purpose!" This has been interpreted by some as a confession, although Letby never confirmed that formally. For all we know this could have been the ramblings of her imagination, a dream diary or notes for a fiction project etc. She did seem to have a rather morbid fixation with the tragic side of her work, looking up the relatives of the babies who died on social media. Most incriminating of all, she altered the patient notes, something also done by Dr Harold Shipman, possibly Britain's worst serial killer. She took medical records home with her and hid them in her bedroom, which is in itself a gross breach of confidentiality law. Letby's explanations for this behaviour were totally inadequate; for example she claimed she only took these classified documents home in order to shred them. However, the hospital has its own shredder; I used to take records to it myself in carefully sealed bags. After Lucy Letby left the Countess unit the unexplained deaths and injuries stopped. She has a whole life order on her sentence which means she can never be considered for probation.
 
A lot of people online have been speaking out ever since the news reported on her charges and I have been contacted personally by three individuals asking me for my opinion. A lot of them reckon she was set up as a scapegoat to conceal the institutional irresponsibility of the Trust board and unit management. I think not. If this were true then we would see NHS nurses being carted off to the slammer every week. What's more, if that were even half true, it hasn't worked. The government has now turned its attention towards the Trust officials and ordered the DHSC to carry out the "Thirlwall inquiry" which is going to destroy a lot of careers and might even result in some criminal malpractice charges. They also face a class action lawsuit from the victims' parents. The New Yorker magazine's Rachel Aviv wrote a very long article claiming that Lucy Letby was a victim of bad luck and wilful bias in analyzing statistics. She also rejected the testimony of one of the expert prosecution witnesses, Dewi Evans, because he had been criticized for his unreliability in previous cases. Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/lucy-letby-was-found-guilty-of-killing-seven-babies-did-she-do-it. (This article is currently invisible in my country. I have included the link in case that changes.) The Guardian have published a similar article: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/09/lucy-letby-evidence-experts-question. I have written a lot about Peter Hitchens in the past, for example https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/06/hold-your-nose-and-vote-tory.html, and am doing so again because he has joined this movement. He doubts the qualifications of the jury because the case involved a lot of specialist medical knowledge. There is no direct evidence against Lucy Letby. Nobody has even caught her in the act. None of the path reports have been designated as unlawful killing by a coroner, meaning that malicious intent does not have to be the only cause of what was done to the victims. None of the babies had, for example, a stab wound or unexpected injection mark. The defence could not, or would not, put expert medical witnesses of their own on the stand. It was only outside the courtroom that several doctors voiced their scepticism. The test to reveal insulin overdoses, for example, did not detect the drug itself, only the antibody response which can "cross react" with other substances. Similar doubts have been raised by other toxicology results listed on the path reports. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNB0CaKI3IM. Several people, including those who know Lucy Letby well, have said things like: "But she doesn't look like a serial killer!" or "She seemed so normal!" This is not evidence of innocence. Serial killers often do appear normal. In fact excessive normality is a bit of a red flag for me, for example: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2019/10/peter-croft-and-ben-emlyn-jones.html. Psychopaths have to wear a "mask of sanity", which is actually the title of the first book about the subject. They tend make this mask as conventional as possible to avoid suspicion. Because there is no real personality behind this facade there is no reason why it should have any oddities. People with eccentricities are usually those who are most likely to attract repulsion and distrust, but they tend to be pretty harmless... A name leaps to mind immediately! A good fictional portrait of the "Mr Perfect" who is really the opposite is Patrick Bateman, the antihero of Brett Easton Ellis' book American Psycho and Mary Harron's 2000 film adaptation. Letby was considered so ordinary by her peers that her nickname was "vanilla". However, this is not evidence of guilt either; some people are just naturally very nondescript. If Lucy Letby is the victim of a miscarriage of justice then is it deliberate or accidental? There seems to be no motive for a conspiracy to frame her. Nobody has benefited from her imprisonment, as I have said. She is not a white straight male so will not aid government's attempt to "balance the conviction rates". Is this supposed miscarriage therefore accidental or maybe just a product of the subconscious drive to assign blame so that things simply make sense? The justice system is supposed to control for that, but there are numerous examples of where it fails abysmally to do so. If this is the case, then an appeal would definitely be justified; but on what grounds? I think there is only one way, the same way accusations stuck to her in the first place: circumstantial evidence. Hypothetically, if Lucy Letby is an innocent woman wrongly incarcerated then eventually this will become very obvious through the same kind of research that was done to incriminate her in the first place. If the mysterious deaths continue then what could be the cause of those? Maybe the data gathered by the Thirlwall inquiry will help. Unfortunately building a statistical case to exonerate this young woman will take a long time, hopefully less time than the four years Operation Hummingbird was running. This article will probably be the first of a series of publications on this subject and I will shortly be presenting a special episode of The Gas Spanner about it. This will include a listener's question and answer session, see: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-gas-spanner-programme-89.html.

The Work by Cabal

 

My good friend and EP&DBHP "CABAL" has put ink to parchment again; this time his article is simply called The Work. It was originally written in 2009 after just two years of service, and fifteen years is a long time in hospital portering, in fact it is in anything; and his opinions have changed. He has republished this for St Theo's Day 2024. I remember him when he first joined us. CABAL had previously been assigned to a hotel in North Oxford and so had no experience of HPing or any other kind of healthcare work. He was put into it by an employment agency, the most common way anybody gets into HPing these days. I am against agencies for anything other than small scale temporary work. It is the old adage that conscripts make bad soldiers. An agency employee is literally thrust into anything and everything whether he or she likes it or not. Why should they feel any commitment or loyalty to their "placement"? It's not something they have any contractual relationship with or have any incentive to become attached to. They are less likely to bond emotionally with their colleagues or take action to gain better pay and conditions. A few decades ago agencies made up about ten thousand workers nationally. Today that figure is nine times as much. The justification is that any HP who impresses management can be offered a contract at their discretion, but some porters have been waiting years. I'm all in favour of a trial period for new employees; you should have to prove you've got what it takes to be a HP, but not for an indefinite length of time. State employers also have no incentive to favour good workers, and as I've said many times before; they strangely seem to want the opposite for some reason, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2019/05/sarah-kuteh-loses-appeal.html.
 
CABAL describes his first day in HPing and how it feels so transient and unique, before the familiarity of experience kicks in. I felt exactly the same when I started in 1988. His experience also totally gels with mine and he has also read Hard Work by Polly Toynbee, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/05/hard-work-by-polly-toynbee.html. CABAL then brings up a thorny subject, internal racism. HPing in the present day, like all low paid and low conventional status jobs in Britain, is done primarily by recent immigrants. The JRH lodge was filled with people from all over the world, but there were significant numbers in particular from the Philippines, Eastern Europe, the Indian subcontinent and Africa. A lot of us felt that the Filipinos especially practiced a form of national nepotism. I don't really mean that as a criticism; perhaps it is just human nature. We are naturally a tribal species after all. Many of the native porters felt they were being discriminated against in this situation. That demographic of course includes myself; but, whether it was justified or not, I never experienced that emotion personally. I found that my loyalty to my EP&DB&SP's drowned out any sense of resentment I might have otherwise felt. This is difficult for me to write about because I know CABAL and we're good friends. He is from Poland and his life has therefore been shaped by the current government immigration policy. I bear him no ill will personally and felt happy serving alongside him, as I did many other of my brother porters from around the globe. I understand why so many people want to come and live in this country, even risking their lives crossing the English Channel in totally inadequate craft. Wouldn't I do the same in their shoes? I once spoke to a young woman in sterile supplies. She was Hungarian and her mother back home in Hungary did the same job at a large hospital in Budapest. The mother earns less in a month than her daughter does in a week! However, detaching emotions and elements of my personal life and taking a step back... I oppose government immigration policy. Most native British people do. I know many people who are not racially native but have been born here who agree with me. CABAL is right that one of the reasons for this quandary is because many natives in the UK are essentially priced out of the job market. For some of us, especially if we have large families, it is actually more lucrative to remain unemployed than join the "precariat". The cost of labour has dropped so low it is just not worth working. My solution would be to find a way to raise the cost of labour and therefore enrich the activity of employment. Mass immigration is just keeping a leaking bucket full; the government is not plugging the leaks. I would include making work more pleasant and fun as well as a way to make more money; which is really what the HPWA is all about. There is a lot more CABAL could have said and he ends his article with a summary. Again, these are issues I totally understand and have covered extensively. I think we both feel inspired by the words of Polly Toynbee, that HPing has the potential to be a wonderful occupation in every way. Doing it is very important because it is an essential element of a team on which millions of people's lives depend. Why is it not? Can't we make it so? Source: https://dreamingspireart.wordpress.com/2024/06/01/the-work-an-essay-2009/.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/04/cabal-on-breathtaking.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/08/cabal-on-paper-mask.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2024/05/cabal-on-nurses-day.html.

Honourary HP's

 

Where you born on June the 1st? If so, firstly, happy birthday for last week. Secondly, could you please email me at bennyjay74@gmx.co.uk. I'm doing some research into a connection between St Theo's Day births and hospital portering in general. I'll ask you a series of questions such as: Have you ever been a HP? Is anybody in your family a HP? etc. When my research project is finished I'll be in touch to let you know if there is a statistical significance. I will be asking professional pollsters and statisticians to help me. I could therefore make you all honourary HP's! A number of celebrities might qualify such as the actors Morgan Freeman, Edward Woodward and Bob Monkhouse; the actress Marilyn Monroe; the musicians Ronnie Wood and Jason Donovan; and Dinesh Karthik the cricketer.

Happy St Theo's Day 2024!

 

In advance!... Apologies, but I will be away on St Theo's Day itself this year, so... On behalf of every serving hospital porter, every former hospital porter, and everybody else who loves, appreciates and supports us, with all the Pride and Dignity of my Extremely Proud and Dignified Brother and Sister Porters, I'd like to wish all my friends and readers, a very happy St Theo's Day; in advance for this St Theo's Day, Saturday the 1st of June.
See here for The Gas Spanner St Theo 2023: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2024/06/the-gas-spanner-programme-85.html.

Cabal on Nurses' Day

 

Nurses have an equivalent to the hospital porters' St Theo's Day, International Nurses Day. This takes place on May the 12th, although in the United States they have National Nurses' Day which is on May the 6th. (Americans stubbornly insist on being different about almost everything!) My brother porter "Cabal", an articulate poet, essayist and commentator, has written his own opinion piece on Nurses' Day. It is honest and fair, and positive; being complimentary where compliments are deserved. I totally agree with his assessment of a HP's carbolicky cohorts. He also links to a rock video with a very nostalgic 80's ambiance. It is of a Polish new wave band called Lady Pank. I'd never heard of them before Cabal told me about them; but then Poland does not export a lot of its contemporary culture. The vocalist looks a lot like the actor Rufus Sewell. The song is called Ratuj Tylko Mnie which means "Rescue only me" and it is about a sick man in hospital with a desperate desire to be attended to by a nurse, with the sexual insinuation inevitable in pop music. Source: https://dreamingspireart.wordpress.com/2024/05/12/tribute/.

"We're Porters Through and Through!"

 

A reedited version of an article I wrote on the original HPANWO blog in 2008.

I guess by now you'll all be thinking I'm a bit bigheaded. "What a conceited sod that Ben is! Strutting around like that, posing in his uniform." Well in a way you'd be right. I'm a bigheaded hospital porter, an arrogant tradesman! But I'm not bigheaded in the sense that I think I'm better than anyone else. I don't believe I'm worth more than any other human being; I just don't believe I'm worth any less. I think I've unknowingly created this image of myself as a persona that is meant to be a kind of satire of other arrogant tradesmen, simply because HPing is not meant to have them. It's fine to be arrogant if you're a celebrity or in the armed forces, and this satirical self-character I've created is a reaction to this elephant-in-the-room double-standard that is blindly accepted and rarely questioned. I suppose I want people to ask the question: Why, oh why is it different if you're a HP, or cleaner, dustman or in any of the other so-called "lowly" jobs? Why are there even such things as "lowly" jobs as opposed to "non-lowly" ones? As I explain in the other articles, the reactions I get from people vary from ridicule to rejection to hostility and even violence: "But you're only a porter! What do you mean you're 'proud'!? Hang your head and bow your shoulders in shame! Do it! NOW!... Please! You have to for my sake! Don't you know what you're doing to me? You're making my whole worldview fall apart. I have to reassess everything now!"

Hard Work by Polly Toynbee

 

A reedited version of an article I wrote on the original HPANWO blog in 2008.
I was given a copy of the book this book by a retired doctor I met on July the 6th 2008. I was attending a party hosted by the Lord Mayor of Oxford to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the National Health Service; I was representing the porters for our hospital's principle trade union UNISON. The doctor had been a young GP in 1948 and was one of the first British physicians to sign her practice over to the NHS. The 2003 book Hard Work by Polly Toynbee chronicles her experiences as she does some of the worst paid jobs in Britain. The author is a veteran liberal journalist who has been raising awareness of social injustice for almost forty years. There is serious poverty in Britain today; and for a change it's not because of unemployment. Fewer people are out of work than during the Thatcher years of the 80's, and most of the poor are not unemployed, but working. A whole sector of super-low paid jobs have emerged under the Blair regime. This has resulted in the emergence of an underclass of employed poor numbering over three million. The majority are women and a large proportion are foreign workers; simply grateful to be in this country after having escaped even worse poverty in their homelands, they are ripe picking for slave labour by public service contractors. The poverty today is less in-your-face than it used to be. Poor people don't wear cloth caps and flannel and more; because of low-cost fake designer clothes, poor people dress the same way as the rich. I found this book very poignant and the author is clearly enraged over the issue, quite rightly. She spent a few months with an employment agency going from one low-paid job to another: care home worker, shop assistant, school dinner lady, bakery worker and... hospital porter.
 
Obviously her experience with hospital portering interested me the most. As a young journalist in 1970 she worked as a porter at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London. Then the foreign crew was made up mostly of people from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean; today they are mostly from Africa, the Arab world, the Philippines and Eastern Europe. Why? For the same reason: They are cheap, willing and easy to exploit. The hospital has changed since the author's last portering tour; the greasy red-bricked Victorian buildings have been knocked down and replaced by a steel and glass PFI corporate fortress; like the new development at my own hospital, the John Radcliffe. She does an outstanding job of researching the life of a porter there. The observations she makes are very perceptive and really strike a chord with me. There's the frustration of working in a depleted department of a depleted NHS; unsanitary levels of hygiene, inadequate equipment, training and tools to do your job. She understands that portering has the potential to be a truly enjoyable and satisfying occupation for all involved. She enjoyed her contact with the patients and the camaraderie with the other porters. She realized how important the role is and says: "The porters seemed like the life-blood of the place or perhaps like the engine oil that greases the system." We have a position and duty that can help patients at their hardest times: "Trundling along, waiting for lifts patients like to chat and tell their operation stories, worrying about what happens next, confiding about their families or the doctors and nurses they liked and feared." She also became aware of the social violence we have to experience from the Conformist Regime through the absurd and inhuman status hierarchy: "We knew the snappy receptionists in some clinics, the downright rude nurses in some wards, the very friendly ones elsewhere, the places where nurses would let you stop for a quick coffee, other kitchens where you would be chased away. An arrogant male staff nurse was the worse: 'You, porter person, come here!' he snapped with deep disdain. It was ever thus, the notch above in the hierarchy is always the class in any workplace that gives you a hard time; the Kulaks, the foreman. This was hospital life from the underside; where passing doctors belonged to another universe, even the young medial students (they never held the door open for a porter with a patient, letting it swing without acknowledgement). The nurses straddled the two worlds, snooty ones placing themselves beyond communication with porters and cleaners, the nice ones helpful and welcoming. You could bet that those who were nice to porters were nice to patients too. One thing became clear: people are recognized more by their status than their face. I was now a porter first, myself second. Passing by in the corridors and wards, I saw several consultants I had interviewed in the past; one of whom I knew quite well. But porters are part of the invisible below-stairs world, the great unnoticed. None of them ever recognized me". She sees that the pay structure is "Byzantine". The contractor itself employs so many agency workers that the staff are all paid differently for doing the same job. The fact that the ancillary staff at the hospital were contracted out gave her a feeling of being divorced from the health service family (as I do too). And the agency staff were "twice removed". Agency staff also have no contractual rights to the job they do; they can be hired and fired at will, which explains why they're so beloved by the PFI cowboys. They also don't have rights to things like negotiated pay deals, most are not unionized. Things have improved slightly since Toynbee wrote the book. At my own hospital the existing crew, including myself, were transferred over on the ROE scheme- Retention of Employment- which allowed us to stay in NHS employment and merely be seconded to the contracting private company. But because of the turbo-charged turnover of the casualized portering service, we pre-contract staff are already in a small minority working alongside agency slaves.
 
Toynbee feels very strongly that the situation could be improved through proper funding and long-term investment in the cheap-and-nastyfied public sector, and I don't deny that she's right; it would be a vast improvement. But in reality the problem runs far deeper than she realizes, and its solutions therefore have to be more drastic. This is an issue I address in more detail in the other HPANWO blogs. If you are a HP or work in one of the other so-called "menial and lowly" professions then quit walking round with your head down and your shoulders slumped! Hold you head high and let your arms swing! Polly Toynbee doesn't have her own website, but here's her Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Toynbee. You can find out more about Hard Work here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/991577.Hard_Work.