Lucy Letby was the “face” of a fundraising appeal to replace the hospital neonatal unit where she murdered seven babies, a public inquiry has heard.
The killer nurse featured prominently on leaflets and posters for the Countess of Chester Hospital’s multi-million-pound Babygrow Appeal, which was launched in 2013.
Letby also provided a staff profile printed in the Chester Standard in the early weeks of the campaign and two years later was pictured in the same newspaper with colleagues in August 2015 as they celebrated reaching the halfway target mark for the new, larger unit.
Giving evidence on Tuesday at the Thirlwall Inquiry into events surrounding Letby’s crimes, the hospital’s former chief financial officer Simon Holden said: “There was various promotional material and leaflets and posters, and Lucy Letby appeared on quite a few of those.
“Nurse Letby was the face of that appeal in effect.”
My role involves caring for a wide range of babies requiring various levels of support
Letby was moved from the unit in July 2016 to an administrative role at the hospital after consultant paediatricians voiced fears she may have deliberately harmed infants in the wake of the deaths of two triplet boys.
Mr Holden recalled that conversations about the charity appeal followed in meetings with hospital executives but he said Letby’s name did not come up.
He said: “To be quite honest I didn’t know who Lucy Letby was so I wouldn’t put the face with the name at the time.
“I had only just arrived in a trust that employed 6,000 people.
“I think what was relevant was the neonatal appeal was definitely a consideration discussed, what do we do? Do we pause it? Do we keep it going?”
He said it later became apparent that all the promotional documentation “had Lucy Letby’s picture on it”.
In her staff profile, Letby, who started work full time at the neonatal unit from January 2012, told the Chester Standard: “My role involves caring for a wide range of babies requiring various levels of support.
“Some are here for a few days, others for many months and I enjoy seeing them progress and supporting their families.
“I hope the new unit will provide a greater degree of privacy and space for parents and siblings.”
The replacement unit opened in 2021, although it will be relocated to a new women and children’s building due to open next summer.
Cheshire Police were not called in by the hospital until May 2017 to investigate the increased number of deaths on the unit after the hospital opted instead to commission a series of reviews
Former hospital board member Andrew Higgins told the inquiry that police should have been involved earlier.
The non-executive director said: “For too long, the trust treated investigations into the increase in deaths too much like those in other mortality or serious incident reviews.
“There were no skills or experience to investigate potential crime and there was an element that was missing. Had we gone to the police back in July 2016, then the whole thing might have come to some kind of resolution far quicker and in a better way.
“It never struck me at the time but I think we were trying to answer questions we weren’t equipped to answer.”
He said the “basic mistake” was that each group tried to come up with definitive answers before escalating further up the line – starting with the internal reviews conducted by clinicians in late 2015 and early 2016, which he said also proved “inconclusive”.
Mr Higgins said: “I think we kind of repeated that as it went up the chain.
“Everybody had a crack at finding what the answer was but nobody succeeded, nobody could. And really that proved to be the big delayer in terms of taking decisive action and resolving things a lot quicker.”
Letby, 34, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016.
The inquiry, sitting at Liverpool Town Hall, is expected to sit until early 2025, with findings published by late autumn of that year.
