Rise in baby deaths at hospital ‘not an outlier’, Letby inquiry hears
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An increase in baby deaths at the Countess of Chester Hospital’s neonatal unit in 2015 was not steep enough to be considered an “outlier”, the public inquiry over Lucy Letby’s crimes has heard. Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge, told the Thirlwall Inquiry that eight deaths at the unit in that year merited a local investigation but “does not mean necessarily that there is a special cause for it”.
According to hospital data, there was one death at the neonatal unit in 2010, two in 2013 and three in 2011, 2012 and 2014 but the number rose to eight in 2015 and five in the first six months of 2016. Former neonatal nurse Letby, 35, started work at the Countess of Chester Hospital in January 2012 and went on to murder seven babies between June 2015 and June 2016.
Sir David said the number of deaths between 2010 and 2014 “actually shows surprising consistency” and he would have expected more variability. Assessing the 2015 figure, he said: “That would generally be considered sufficient to trigger an alert and someone should look at this locally but not extreme enough to be considered an outlier.
“There are about 150 neonatal units in the UK … and therefore we would expect that one signal of this magnitude to occur each year just by chance alone through no underlying cause, nothing special changing at all. “This is a surprising event within the Countess of Chester but from a national level this is not very surprising at all. We would expect this to happen every year somewhere.”.
