Lucy Letby’s former boss who ‘ignored concerns’ over killer nurse investigated by watchdog

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Lucy Letby’s former boss, who has been accused of “ignoring” concerns about the serial killer nurse, is being investigated by the nursing watchdog.

Alison Kelly, who was director of nursing at the Countess of Chester Hospital before leaving in 2021, has been suspended from her current role as nursing director at the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust in Salford.

Letby, Britain’s most prolific child serial killer, was on Monday handed a whole life prison sentence for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six more in 2015 and 2016 while working at the hospital.

Now, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) has confirmed that her former boss, Ms Kelly, has been referred for a fitness to practise investigation.

Ms Kelly’s referral, sent in 2018, had been paused pending the outcome of the trial at the request of the police, the regulator said.

Now the trial is over, the NMC will investigate and decide whether there are grounds to take her to a fitness to practice hearing.

The former nursing director was suspended from her role at Northern Care Alliance this week after the Department for Health and Social Care announced an independent inquiry into the failings of the NHS in the Letby case.

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Ms Kelly, alongside other senior directors at the Countess of Chester hospital, including medical director Ian Harvey, have been accused of ignoring concerns raised by doctors from as early as June 2015 and were said to have been “protective” over Letby.

Mr Harvey, who was a surgeon, was referred to the General Medical Council by doctors in 2018. The GMC said it investigated the referral and liaised with the police. A year later the regulator cleared Mr Harvey of any wrongdoing.

The GMC said: “At the conclusion of our investigation, our senior decision-makers decided that the case did not reach the threshold for referral to the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal Service for a hearing.”

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The former medical director has since retired and has removed himself from the GMC register.

During her trial, the court heard that a number of consultants working with Letby had started to raise concerns about her association with babies collapsing as early as 2015.

She put in a grievance against her employer – which ruled in her favour – after she was moved to clerical duties, and senior doctors were forced to apologise and even attend mediation.

One of the consultants, Dr Stephen Brearey, has since called for NHS managers to be held accountable in the same way that medics are.

Asked if he would like to see regulation of hospital administrators, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Absolutely. Because doctors and nurses all have their regulatory bodies that we have to answer to.

“And quite often we’ll see senior managers who have no apparent accountability for what they do in our trusts, and they move to other trusts, and you worry about their future actions.

“There doesn’t seem to be any system to make them accountable and for them to justify their actions in a systematic way.”

The government will hold an independent inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Letby’s crimes to ensure “vital lessons are learned”.

However, Dr Brearey said he would like to see a statutory inquiry, backing calls from the victims’ families, Sir Keir Starmer and a string of former justice secretaries, for the inquiry to be given greater powers to compel witnesses to give evidence.