21 Aug Hospital managers in Letby case ‘were not keen to have the truth come out’
A lawyer representing two of the families who suffered at the hands of Lucy Letby says a public inquiry ‘needs to have proper powers’ in order to investigate what went wrong at the Countess of Chester Hospital.
Speaking to GB News Richard Scorer, Head of Abuse Law and Public Inquiries at Slater and Gordon, said: “We know we’re dealing here with a set of hospital managers who were not keen, to put it mildly to have the truth of this come out.
“It would be naive to think that you’re going to get proper cooperation in the context of an inquiry,” he added.
“In order to have an effective inquiry, we need an inquiry with proper powers, the power to compel witnesses to attend and answer questions, but also the power to compel production of documents – that’s really important as well.
“There’ll be lots of documents that are going to be very relevant to this and the inquiry needs to see all of them and be able to make a proper judgment about what’s happened and they can only do that if it has the proper powers.”
Mr Scorer said his clients were horrified and appalled when they learned that one of the reasons the police were not called in earlier was due to reputation management of the hospital.
“Unfortunately, it’s something we’ve seen in all too many cases, whether it’s to do with awful situations like this or child abuse.
“Institutions and organisations placing reputational protection ahead of patient safety and public safety, it’s something we’ve seen far too often.
“And in the health service. I think we have a particular problem.”
“With clinicians, there’s a process of accountability for them.
“But with hospital managers, there doesn’t seem to be a proper process of accountability. And you get the situation where hospital managers can fail and then fail upwards and get promoted into other roles where they fail and then retire on gold plated pensions.
“That is something that cuts across the whole of the health service, not just this case, and it’s something that the inquiry needs to look at.”
Mr Scorer said an “effective inquiry” was needed “to see exactly what happened.”
“We need to get to the truth – that’s really important. And I think then more broadly than that, we have to look at the accountability of the individuals here and then how we can ensure that there is proper accountability, management accountability across the health service as well.”
“One fundamental point in all of this is when you have failings in the health service, who is looking at those, who is making the judgment about what’s gone wrong?”
