Lucy Letby: Police urged to investigate hospital bosses after failure to act - what is corporate negligence?

Police have been urged to charge bosses at the former hospital of killer Lucy Letby after warnings and complaints about the former neonatal nurse's conduct were ignored.

Letby, 33, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after she was convicted of killing seven babies and attempting to kill six others between 2015 and 2016 while she worked as a neonatal nurse at Countess of Chester Hopsital in Cheshire. Her troubling conduct was noted by colleagues as far back as 2015, with some reporting their concerns to hospital management.

However, bosses failed to act on the reports. According to staff on the ward at the time, bosses discouraged her colleagues from sharing their concerns with the police and even made those concerned apologise to Letby for make reports over her behaviour.

Now the prosecution's lead medical expert, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, has said that he will write to Cheshire Constabulary to ask that they probe bosses for corporate negligence and criminal negligence.

Speaking to The Observer, Mr Evans said: “They were grossly negligent. I shall write to Cheshire police and ask them, from what I have heard following the end of the trial, that I believe that we should now investigate a number of managerial people in relation to issues of corporate manslaughter.

He added: “I think this is a matter that demands an investigation into corporate manslaughter.”

Dr Stephen Breary, head consultant of the Countess of Chester Hospital's neonatal unit, first raised concerns over Letby with bosses in 2015 after an increase in baby collapses. A request for an urgent meeting from doctors was also ignored, with Dr Breary claiming that deaths could have been avoided as early as February 2016.

Dr Ravi Jayaram, a consultant paediatrician on the same ward, also revealed that staff concerns were raised again as collapses and sudden deaths continued to increase. Both Dr Breary and Dr Jayaram spoke of their view that hospital executives refused to investigate the reports properly or involve police in the matter out of fear that it would damage the NHS trust's reputation.

The former head of the NHS trust, Sir Duncan Nichol, said that the board were "misled" by hospital chiefs over the situation after they reported the findings of two commissioned reviews of the ward.

However neither review investigated the concerns of senior staff who had initially reported Letby, instead focusing on the broader running of the neonatal unit and the statistics surrounding infant deaths on the ward at the time. The reviews were launched after she was removed from the unit in July 2016 with hospital bosses stating that there was "no criminal activity pointing to any one individual".

In a statement to the BBC, Sir Duncan said: “I believe that the board was misled in December 2016 when it received a report on the outcome of the external, independent case reviews.

“We were told explicitly that there was no criminal activity pointing to any one individual, when in truth the investigating neonatologist had stated that she had not had the time to complete the necessary in-depth case reviews.”

What is corporate manslaughter?

Corporate manslaughter is a charge brought against business or organisation where the running or management of the operation has been ruled to have contributed to a person's death. The business or organisation will be found criminally liable for the person's death if they are found to have major managing failures which has resulted in a gross breach of a duty of care.

The corporate body is the subject charged with the crime of corporate manslaughter, however individuals can still be found liable of breaches of health and safety law.

Often the punishment for the business or organisation being found guilty of corporate manslaughter is a hefty fine.