No one who has paid any attention to NHS scandals over the past few decades should be at all surprised by the way in which managers at Lucy Letby’s hospital repeatedly dismissed concerns about her. When worried consultants produced considerable evidence to show that the nurse was present at every single event where a baby had dramatically collapsed or suddenly died, they ended up being the ones in the firing line. Management even forced them to apologise to Letby personally at an HR meeting, to which, bizarrely, the nurse brought along her parents.
Doctors are suspicious of the calibre of those managing them, and the managers are often on the defensive
Yet in the NHS, monumental managerial failures are not unusual, they’re typical. In the independent inquiries into all NHS disasters of recent years, such as Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay and Shrewsbury and Telford, there is one common theme: the managers got in the way of those trying to get to the truth.
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