‘Horrified’ by documents she saw about the hospital’s neonatal unit, the former Countess of Chester boss fears history could repeat itself
Joining the Countess of Chester should have been a kind of homecoming for Dr Susan Gilby. She gave birth to the youngest of her three children at the hospital, and spent part of her training there.
But within days of becoming its medical director and deputy chief executive in 2018, she was filled with dread. “I remember sitting on my own in that office… and I thought, ‘What have I done?'”
Gilby had just discovered a trove of papers about the neonatal unit which, to her mind, showed that the hospital had bungled its response to a series of unexplained deaths and collapses of babies in its care.
As is now known, these disastrous outcomes were the work of Lucy Letby, a neonatal nurse who worked at the Countess of Chester, in Cheshire. Last month, she was convicted of murdering seven children and attempting to murder six others, making her one of Britain’s worst serial killers. The police are currently reviewing the records of 4,000 babies, as part of an ongoing investigation into other infants she may have harmed.