My mother returned to nursing in her 40s as a neonatal nurse.
She loved her work and by all accounts was an exceptional professional, displaying her remarkable warmth, expertise, and duty of care to the infants and families in her care.
She used to set off on her bike in the darkness of an early Edinburgh morning and return in the evening energised by her work.
She would not have been able to understand any part of the tragedy that is Lucy Letby. Everything I’ve read about that case betrays the trust that people placed in people like my mother.
Trust can be defined as the willingness to place things that are important to you in the hands of someone else, i.e. your vulnerability.
As my colleague Herman Brodie has taught me, the higher that level of vulnerability the higher the level of trust required.
When it comes to being the parent of a premature baby there can possibly be no greater requirement for trust, when placing your child in the hands of a neonatal nurse.
Fundamental to that trust is that parents’ believe the other person has the necessary expertise, and secondly has positive intentions towards their child.
By all accounts Lucy Letby displayed all the necessary warmth towards the parents and the babies when in view.
Tragically she broke that bond of trust when unsupervised.
What she did was criminal in the extreme and she will now spend the rest of her life in prison.
Yet the legacy of her actions will live on for years, as mothers and families inevitably question the intentions of the very people in whom they need to place their trust.
I can only imagine how my mother would have responded but I’m fairly certain she would have felt broken that her lifetime of dedication to vulnerable babies was called into question by the actions of another.
Professionals in any field, carry not only a responsibility for themselves, but for the professional group to which they belong.
Unfortunately, it would seem that people were unable to connect the data already collected by neonatal services to identify the unusual patterns in babies collapsing or dying unexpectedly, possibly because of the apparent warmth that Letby displayed towards her patients and their families.
If we are to protect patients and the public, and the vast body of professional doctors and nurses doing incredible work in this critical field we should prioritise and welcome the collection and analysis of such data.
As professionals we place our own vulnerability in the hands of our fellow professionals.
I know my mother would have welcomed anything that protected ‘her’ babies – from the actions of a rogue colleague.
