Lucy Letby hospital consultant tells BBC inquiry makes for grim reading

One of the senior doctors who tried to raise concerns about Lucy Letby with hospital managers has told the BBC the final inquiry report makes for "grim reading".

He said that he accepted that consultants must bear "collective" responsibility for some of the failings identified in the report.

"When I say, 'we consultants', I am responsible as well and if my other consultant colleagues didn't go to the police, I should have."

In the 822-page document, Lady Justice Thirlwall described "a complete failure to protect babies on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital".

Reflecting on the findings for the first time, Gibbs said: "I wasn't expecting it to be an easy read and it certainly isn't. I'd imagine it's an extremely difficult read for the parents of the babies concerned.

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Gibbs, who began working in Chester in 1994 and is now retired, agreed with the report's finding that hospital executives had multiple opportunities to act and potentially save babies' lives while the deaths were happening.

Managers "were determined to ensure that we accepted Lucy Letby had been wrongly suspected of doing any harm," the senior doctor explained.

While one of his colleagues had missed the relevance of the results when they came back from the lab, it had been a collective team failure, Dr Gibbs concluded.

Letby, who maintains her innocence, is serving 15 whole-life terms for the murders and has twice been denied permission to appeal against her convictions.