Lucy Letby inquiry: Nurse was face of hospital campaign

Cheshire Police were not called in by the hospital until May 2017 to investigate the increased number of deaths on the unit after the hospital opted instead to commission a series of reviews.

Former hospital board member Andrew Higgins told the inquiry that police should have been involved earlier.

The non-executive director said: “For too long, the trust treated investigations into the increase in deaths too much like those in other mortality or serious incident reviews.

He said the “basic mistake” was that each group tried to come up with definitive answers before escalating further up the line – starting with the internal reviews conducted by clinicians in late 2015 and early 2016, which he said also proved “inconclusive”.

Letby, 34, from Hereford, is serving 15 whole-life orders after she was convicted at Manchester Crown Court of murdering seven infants and attempting to murder seven others, with two attempts on one of her victims, between June 2015 and June 2016.

The inquiry, sitting at Liverpool Town Hall, is expected to sit until early 2025, with findings published by late autumn of that year.