[News] Baby murder nurse case

[Weststander]

CCTV would have all sorts of privacy issues with patients, it's a difficult solution. It you wanted to use it in case of malpractice where the negative effects weren't known for years, you'd end up having to keep the footage (and all of it) for years. Technology is probably the answer where the drugs administered (and by who) is automatically recorded. If you can track an item being stolen from a supermarket, you can track a medicine being given to a patient in a hospital.

As for two medical personnel that isn't going to happen. I did have some stats around that. I witnessed on a couple of occasions last year, an emergency alarm being rang by a nurse on a ward because there weren't enough nurses on shift... in a high dependency unit.


But Whistle-blowers yes. All our institutions have a major issue with that full stop.

One of the problems was that Letby also used innocuous non-drugs. Plus I know this through other circumstances, the correct volume of drugs can be removed from the cabinet/trolly, then either illicitly withheld or played with so that one patient gets more, one less.

 

[banjo]

One of the problems was that Letby also used innocuous non-drugs. Plus I know this through other circumstances, the correct volume of drugs can be removed from the cabinet/trolly, then either illicitly withheld or played with so that one patient gets more, one less.

Mrs B worked in ICU children’s ward and can’t believe insulin is still not controlled/signed for. As proven, lethal in the wrong hands.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Of course I don't believe Shipman is innocent!
I wasn't comparing what Shipman did to what Letby did. My comparison was between those people who believed Shipman was not capable of doing what he did, ie his patients and those people who believed Letby was not capable of doing what she did, ie her close friends, many of whom she has known since school. I only made that comparison because another poster said that Shipman's patients didn't believe he was capable of such a thing. The whole point i was making was Shipman's patients didn't know him to the same level of intimacy that Letby's friends know her. It was therefore easier for Shipman to hide certain facets of his character from his patients whereas if you have a life long, or long standing close friend most facets of your character inevitably reveal themselves, or at least clues to them, but that didn't seem to be the case with Letby. There weren't even any clues to those that were closest to her in all those years.

Obviously she wasn't going to reveal to them that she had a penchant for murdering babies, but she might have revealed a slightly twisted or dark sense of humour for instance or her choice of literature or other reading matter, maybe an "innocent" interest in serial killers even. But none of her friends or former friends have come forward offering any insights into her character which might suggest something off kilter.

And of course im not suggesting that if youre interested in dark subject matter then youre likely to have a penchant for putting it into practice, I was the first to defend Colin Stagg when he was enduring trial by the tabloid press simply because he had an interest in Satanism, but rather if one has a penchant for something as abominable as what Letby did then surely its going to be reflected in other facets of your life, your interests, your sense of humour, your relationships with others, your attitudes. But with Letby seemingly not. She was niceness personified according to her friends. I'm sure the tabloids have done plenty of digging with friends and colleagues to see if they can come up with anything they can put their unique spin and interpretation on but even they seem to have drawn a blank and they'll clutch at anything.

OK I understand your point now.

One reason I didn't was that in fact only one person has stepped up to say they are a longstanding pal of this nurse. This person says (I paraphrase) the nurse was a simple gentle soul who showed no signs of malcontent, albeit she did seem to have a morbid attachment to a male doctor. All the rest of her previous coterie of chums have refused to speak.

I would also point out that hiding in plain sight is a hallmark of MSBP. Having a twisted or dark sense of humour is not part of the phenotype. It isn't about fun for them. There is no reason to be surprised that it came as a shock to her friends and family (albeit as I noted earlier, there will certainly be expert practitioners of the retrospectroscope along soon with 'I always knew there was something wrong with her', and a media outlet ready to sell a trope.

Of course I don't believe Shipman is innocent!
I wasn't comparing what Shipman did to what Letby did. My comparison was between those people who believed Shipman was not capable of doing what he did, ie his patients and those people who believed Letby was not capable of doing what she did, ie her close friends, many of whom she has known since school. I only made that comparison because another poster said that Shipman's patients didn't believe he was capable of such a thing. The whole point i was making was Shipman's patients didn't know him to the same level of intimacy that Letby's friends know her. It was therefore easier for Shipman to hide certain facets of his character from his patients whereas if you have a life long, or long standing close friend most facets of your character inevitably reveal themselves, or at least clues to them, but that didn't seem to be the case with Letby. There weren't even any clues to those that were closest to her in all those years.

Obviously she wasn't going to reveal to them that she had a penchant for murdering babies, but she might have revealed a slightly twisted or dark sense of humour for instance or her choice of literature or other reading matter, maybe an "innocent" interest in serial killers even. But none of her friends or former friends have come forward offering any insights into her character which might suggest something off kilter.

And of course im not suggesting that if youre interested in dark subject matter then youre likely to have a penchant for putting it into practice, I was the first to defend Colin Stagg when he was enduring trial by the tabloid press simply because he had an interest in Satanism, but rather if one has a penchant for something as abominable as what Letby did then surely its going to be reflected in other facets of your life, your interests, your sense of humour, your relationships with others, your attitudes. But with Letby seemingly not. She was niceness personified according to her friends. I'm sure the tabloids have done plenty of digging with friends and colleagues to see if they can come up with anything they can put their unique spin and interpretation on but even they seem to have drawn a blank and they'll clutch at anything.

Sorry, I missed off an s. I meant to ask you if you think she's innocent.

In fact only one person has stepped up to say they are a longstanding pal of this nurse. This person says (I paraphrase) the nurse was a simple gentle soul who showed no signs of malcontent, albeit she did seem to have a morbid attachment to a male doctor. All the rest of her previous coterie of chums have refused to speak.

I would also point out that hiding in plain sight is a hallmark of MSBP. Having a twisted or dark sense of humour is not part of the phenotype. It isn't about fun for them. There is no reason to be surprised that it came as a shock to her friends and family (albeit as I noted earlier, there will certainly be expert practitioners of the retrospectroscope along soon with 'I always knew there was something wrong with her', and a media outlet ready to sell a trope).

 

[marlowe]

Do you really know your friends though ? On the documentary they showed pictures of her on nights out. That doesn’t make for a particularly deep friendship and quite frankly you never really know what’s going on in people’s heads no matter how much of a friend you think you are.

I was thinking more of her closest friends not her peripheral ones. On the Panorama doc they interviewed a friend who she had known since her school days who knew her very well or at least was convinced she did. She gave the impression they were very close friends.

 

[Thunder Bolt]

I was thinking more of her closest friends not her peripheral ones. On the Panorama doc they interviewed a friend who she had known since her school days who knew her very well or at least was convinced she did. She gave the impression they were very close friends.

Being pedantic, that is what HWT said. A friend, not friends (plural).

 

[Seagull58]

I don’t think victims feel cheated. As the barrister pointed out, some defendants actually stare at the families, make gestures at them, or pull faces.

One family has publicly said that they wanted to see her in the courtroom being sentenced and they have been deprived of that.

 

[Seagull58]

It needs fewer managers and a different rubric. Same in academia. I agree this is nothing to do with public/private (and the associated culture war) other than the public sector has tried to run itself like a business, and this hasn't worked. (Well, it could be argued that humans in general are not capable of making large institutions work well for staff and clients; there may be some truth in this).

My experience in academia (and with medical training) has shown me time and time again that the cutting edge people are not the ones making the decisions. Just before I went on holiday I was sent a very long email from an administrator telling me how to check all my teaching timetables and make any corrections, using a rubric invented by administrators (their colour coding, their dropdowns, in an excel spreadsheet with more than thirty columns), for the benefit of administrators, with a deadline a few days after I get back from holiday, and a passive aggressive message that it would not be 'possible' to make any changes requested after that date. Any notion of improving content, responding to student feedback, in other words making things better, forget it. It is all about meeting the needs of the most important people at my university - the administrators and their massive departments of minions. For example, there are three separate groups of administrators involved with creating timetables, creating coursework and exam submission portals, marking portals, and then creation of marksheets. And they f*** up the marks every year, in interesting new ways every year. And this is all 'acceptable'.

Twenty years ago when it all started going tits up, I was asked to go onto a web site and fill out a great big survey by an administer I had never heard of working in a 'department' I had never heard of. I told her to fill it out herself (she had access to all the relevant data). I may have added 'am I here for your benefit or are you here for mine?'. Within hours I received a shirty email from her boss, copied to the principle of my college. This demanded an apology. I was able to write one of those 'your role at (institute) is immeasurable' and 'your contribution is extraordinary' type letters (it was a letter). This was accepted. Within a few years, the administrator, her boss and her department no longer existed. Replaced by a differently named and bigger department. In fact I think it was renamed 'Institute of Education' or something. They have no role in any of my teaching. I think they just write about it for PR purposes.

I can imagine it is just like this, and worse, in the NHS. If you try to create a market model in what is essentially a socialist organization, you have to invent goals, plans and strategies. Where I work we have 'vision 2030'. We are all working to achieve vision 2030. I have no idea what vision 2030 is. Nobody does. In the meantime we have to invent fresh process to show we are working towards vision 2030. I could go on but we would all lose the will to live. Fortunately we have someone on £300K a year in change of all this. I think they are called 'Head of Deliverance'.

Meanwhile an old professor who has repeatedly been reported for encroaching on personal space and, what two different female students described to me as, 'he seems to have a problem with eye level' and 'he was constantly staring at my chest' has been advised to not be alone with female students (no other action taken other than his promotion to positions of ever increasing power and influence). When I criticized what amounted to scientific illiteracy bordering on fraud in a student presentation I was actually shushed by an academic colleague. We are now teaching science as if it is horoscopes - genuflecting to techniques and blindly following the loudest voices and the most glitzy hubris. This is not being measured because real quality in higher education is hard to measure and it is much easier to create bogus goals and outcomes that are more spreadsheetable. It stinks.

I was implementing a new IT system at a customer back in the 90's (a large aerospace company). This was part of a project in the Company titled "Fit for the Future", better known by the employees as "Fit for f***-all".

 

[portlock seagull]

One family has publicly said that they wanted to see her in the courtroom being sentenced and they have been deprived of that.

It’s been explained countless times why that isn’t always possible, including potential law changes. But as experts (excluding NSC ones!) have said, can’t introduce or change law on basis of 1 individual. It’s a very different situation for eg Lee Rigbys killer, look how he behaved? And there will be even more problematic criminals who will yell, spit, scream, laugh, fight, bite and do everything possible to inflict more misery on victims families. It’s not a simple situation unfortunately. Got to be really thought through, knee jerk does no one any favours

 

[Guinness Boy]

I can imagine it is just like this, and worse, in the NHS. If you try to create a market model in what is essentially a socialist organization, you have to invent goals, plans and strategies. Where I work we have 'vision 2030'. We are all working to achieve vision 2030. I have no idea what vision 2030 is. Nobody does. In the meantime we have to invent fresh process to show we are working towards vision 2030. I could go on but we would all lose the will to live. Fortunately we have someone on £300K a year in change of all this. I think they are called 'Head of Deliverance'.

Having spent my life working in the private sector for companies offering professional services that have to make profits to survive, all of this is very familiar to me.

The idea that the same nonsense is being applied in institutions that exist to either a) make human beings more intelligent for the supposed benefit of all human beings or b) make sick human beings better, deliver babies and do research is absolutely extraordinary.

It's the culture of the middle manager. Personally, I blame Trump and Sugar for creating and exporting The Apprentice. Well, them and a whole load of books,

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

Having spent my life working in the private sector for companies offering professional services that have to make profits to survive, all of this is very familiar to me.

The idea that the same nonsense is being applied in institutions that exist to either a) make human beings more intelligent for the supposed benefit of all human beings or b) make sick human beings better, deliver babies and do research is absolutely extraordinary.

It's the culture of the middle manager. Personally, I blame Trump and Sugar for creating and exporting The Apprentice. Well, them and a whole load of books,

Indeed. I am beginning to wonder whether there is something wrong with Homo Sapiens. My old boss, a man who invented a real drug that is used in medicine, once said to me 'when I left behind those jackasses I was in sixth form with I wasn't expecting to find, when I became a lecturer, the same jackasses as my academic colleagues'. There seems to be a conspiracy of mediocrity, lead by the mediocre, whose only skill is gaming any system to their favour.

'Market reforms' in academia began in the 80s. (Maggi Thatch). Something was needed. There were many academics doing f*** all (literally not showing up for months, and in at ten and off at four to play golf typical among those who did do a bit of work). However, instead of targeting the piss-takers, 'consultants' were invited to propose 'rationalizations'. Just before I got my lectureship in the late 80s, my college was close to closure with only the nursing department retained (owing to their high levels of 'student satisfaction' apparently). We managed to dodge that but then underwent a sequence of mergers. In all the years subsequent I have seen only one member of staff sacked for doing no work. However the levels of management have gone from principal, his secretary, and the occasional 'consultant', plus an office of 20 to handle UCCA (pre UCAS) admissions, and collate marks (which academic departments finalized in a book with a pen), to thousands of staff involved with requesting, receiving, sifting (and writing reports on) information, none of which is used except to populate REF and TEF (research and teaching 'excellence' framework) data that is graded by committees of other academic appointed by HMG, resulting in a ranking of department, school, division and centre, (the names change regularly) for 'excellence' in different areas such as student satisfaction, and student marks attainment. So the unis spend millions gaming all this because REF and TEF determine how much money HMG allows us to have/keep for salaries and for infrastructure. And for paying the thousands of people doing all the paper shuffling.

So each uni is like a football club where the playing staff spend 10% of their time playing football, 30% of their time training, and 60% of their time writing out their playing strategies, and then writing reports on their own performance post match, for review by hundreds of other employees collectively earning thousands of times as much money as the players.

We would be in the f***ing Vauxhall Nova league, no the Trabant league, before you could say 'you jackasses'

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

CCTV would have all sorts of privacy issues with patients, it's a difficult solution. It you wanted to use it in case of malpractice where the negative effects weren't known for years, you'd end up having to keep the footage (and all of it) for years. Technology is probably the answer where the drugs administered (and by who) is automatically recorded. If you can track an item being stolen from a supermarket, you can track a medicine being given to a patient in a hospital.

As for two medical personnel that isn't going to happen. I did have some stats around that. I witnessed on a couple of occasions last year, an emergency alarm being rang by a nurse on a ward because there weren't enough nurses on shift... in a high dependency unit.


But Whistle-blowers yes. All our institutions have a major issue with that full stop.

So, underfunding/Brexit-related staff shortages (party politics) may come into the picture, after all.

How much money, and how much loosening of the immigration barriers are people prepared to countenance in order to have properly staffed hospitals that would reduce the risk of, among many other things, a maladjusted tit-witch injecting air into neonates, I wonder?

Just thinking about solutions, the key being detection and prevention. I'd be disappointed but unsurprised if this post triggers a 'bringing politics into a tragedy' trope.

 

[The Clamp]

So, underfunding/Brexit-related staff shortages (party politics) may come into the picture, after all.

How much money, and how much loosening of the immigration barriers are people prepared to countenance in order to have properly staffed hospitals that would reduce the risk of, among many other things, a maladjusted tit-witch injecting air into neonates, I wonder?

Just thinking about solutions, the key being detection and prevention. I'd be disappointed but unsurprised if this post triggers a 'bringing politics into a tragedy' trope.

Sorry but “maladjusted tit-witch”



That’s made my day.

 

[Si Gull]

Sorry but “maladjusted tit-witch”



That’s made my day.

Me too, had to check the urban dictionary to verify the validity of tit-witch...yep, it's valid. HWT

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

 

[Seagull58]

So, underfunding/Brexit-related staff shortages (party politics) may come into the picture, after all.

How much money, and how much loosening of the immigration barriers are people prepared to countenance in order to have properly staffed hospitals that would reduce the risk of, among many other things, a maladjusted tit-witch injecting air into neonates, I wonder?

Just thinking about solutions, the key being detection and prevention. I'd be disappointed but unsurprised if this post triggers a 'bringing politics into a tragedy' trope.

How many murdering nurses have we had in hospitals? Two in the last 30 years or so (Beverley Allit being the other)? Better managers/administrators with less cya would seem to be the obvious lesson learned from this case.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

How many murdering nurses have we had in hospitals? Two in the last 30 years or so (Beverley Allit being the other)? Better managers/administrators with less cya would seem to be the obvious lesson learned from this case.

That we know about, but yes.

Also to be fair, we also have Dr Harold Shipman to consider.

In retrospect these human outliers will always be hard to detect, so I may have slipped into a confirmation bias (I hate the tories) groove, there. Apologies.

 

[Is it PotG?]

This thing has filed an appeal against her convictions.

 

[Icy Gull]

This thing has filed an appeal against her convictions.

What is she putting forward as mitigating circumstances?

 

[GT49er]

What is she putting forward as mitigating circumstances?

Probably nothing worthwhile, but the lawyers (who are presumably being paid for out of the public purse - I very much doubt she's got the funds to pay them, and for a piece of shit like her I don't think crowd-funding would be much of a goer) working on the 'case' are probably looking to make enough to retire on.

 

[HangletonGull]

I assume her house will be sold to pay off her legal team?