oldjamfan
VIP Member
This is from the beautiful lady that goes by the name of docmum. Eloquent and insightful I’m sure you will all agree 
“The posts in recent days about the dire care from the CoCH has made it click as to what helped me come to terms with LL’s guilt before we heard everything in court the first time round. Because actually yes, some of the care was absolutely awful. But awful care happens in every ward in every hospital daily. Those of us that work in a medical setting will put our hands up and say that in every shift we attend we notice something suboptimal and that’s not an exaggeration. It could be a missed blood result, a drug not signed for, a porter attending too late to get a patient to a scan, a phone not answered. The list is endless because as we all know, the NHS is grossly underfunded and overused. Mistakes happen, usually as a result of human error and hospitals have teams of governance for this very reason. Staff are paid to attend monthly mandatory governance meetings with devoted ‘morbidity and mortality’ sessions to discuss what can be learned, even from ‘non-fault’ deaths. Doctors are taught to accept mistakes from university - they are taught in what is fondly known as a ‘shit sandwich’ method where someone senior will watch you do a procedure even as simple as taking blood and they have to tell you what you did well, what you could do better, and what to remember for next time. Even with a simple procedure you would be expected to find a constructive criticism in approach. Training and revalidation is based on discussing suboptimal care and lessons learned. Going back to this case, what stands out for me now is that things were so bad on the unit outside the scope of ‘accepted error’ in a health care environment. Babies are linear, fairly logical patients. The complications when they are born are essentially due to their prematurity, something genetic or in-utero complications, or a problem because of their prematurity ie brain or breathing complications, metabolic imbalance. Babies don’t come in with chest pain but forget to say they’d snorted 2g the night before. They haven’t smoked 20 a day for 40 years. They fit a certain number of logical patterns. There are of course always babies that break the rules, and may behave differently to anticipated but then let us factor in the staffing in hospitals. All patients in hospitals have the privilege of having a fresh set of eyes on them at most every 12 hours, someone who might interpret the data differently even if the previous nurse or doctor didn’t see it. This helps to safeguard the patients from the above mentioned ‘human error’. So what was it that made this unit have outcomes so much worse that what is expected even in the context of human error? It was the presence of one specific human at each extreme case. I remember a discussion last year about whether she could have just been a ‘bad’ nurse. Having someone as ‘unlucky’ as a LL, even if she was just an awful nurse, is basically statistically impossible because of all of the safeguarding measures around them - even in the most busy or deprived hospitals worldwide, individual healthcare staff members are protected from human error by the training, protocols and colleagues around them. The whole ‘lack of forensic evidence’ thing is exhausting. A serial killer is smart enough to know that hospitals incinerate their waste daily. A medical serial killer is also smart enough to choose causes of death that don’t have an identifiable clinical element to them - non specific bleeding, air emboli, hiding insulin in plain sight (which is undisputed by the defence). So what evidence is there? Evidence of times being changed in the notes, evidence of obsessional behaviour towards the victims. Evidence of the same person being in direct contact with the non specific cause of death. Speak to anyone you know who works in healthcare, and they’ll tell you of the absolute terror in realising you’ve left a handover sheet in your pocket - it guarantees a sleepless night until the following shift when you can take it in and return it to the confidential waste. It could jeopardise the career you’ve worked so hard for, just a single sheet of paper - not even a box full at your parents house. Ask the same people about memorable sick people. They most likely won’t remember a name, but they’ll remember what bed they were in and who else was there. They certainly won’t know their family members names two years on. Moving on to calls around a miscarriage of justice, let me say this. The day LL walked in to court, she was innocent until she was proven to be guilty. And she was proven to be guilty but not on all counts, as we well know. That courtroom heard evidence beyond what almost all of us could imagine, and the one positive from the NG verdicts or the hung verdicts is that the jurors did in fact consider every bit of evidence pointed to them for the guilty cases. Hats off to the jurors who felt there wasn’t the burden of evidence in some cases and voted NG because to me, that absolutely solidifies the guilty verdicts as well proven in court. Those that blame the jurors or the legal teams need to answer why she wasn’t found unanimously guilty on all counts if it was such a miscarriage of justice. The Judge, who knows certainly more than even the jurors pulled no punches in either of his sentencing remarks - why could he confidently instruct the juries as he did, and make remarks as he did if there were doubts? The man could barely look at her. The clickbait articles will pass, and are a sad reflection of society today. When the original trial was underway, you all know that I had occasional ‘what if’ moments, not doubting her actions but actually comprehending the scale of her actions. LL was an attractive, smiling, privileged white woman working in a secure public sector job. Yes, it is unthinkable that she could do what she is now guilty of doing. What attracts the social media fans? Being different? Having attention on Twitter/facebook? Or a naïve outlook on the world not comprehending that LL has a severe mental illness behind the once-shiny facade. That handsome doctor that delivered those babies, and held peoples hands during their troubles? That was Dr Shipman. That kind smiling nurse who hugged/cared for those peoples daughters or sisters, and was regarded as part of her patients families? That was Beverley Allitt. Here’s where LL shows even more of what kind of person she is beyond that exterior. She knows about the people supporting her online, something we haven’t seen with previous generations of serial killers. Let’s allow ourselves to be distracted by her disgusting shouting ‘I’m innocent’ on Friday, what else did we expect her to shout? But it wasn’t about the words she used, it’s about the shouting. She wanted the last word. She wanted the headline. She wanted to hurt parents more on the day when their recovery should be allowed to start. She couldn’t steal the headline about not attending court so she wanted to steal it in another way. She wanted it to be all about her - where have we seen that before? In every text message she’s sent that was released and in the post it notes - that’s where. And so if there was ever any personal doubt about the context of her messages or notes, please refer yourself to her ‘I’m innocent’ outburst. This outburst seeks to have gained her a possibility of sympathy from the press via her die hard fans.. but that’s what the press have craved for 18 months. Positive or negative headline, they wanted the clicks generated from a modern day female serial killer. And because there was no ‘smoking gun’ for the headline, they use the sensationalist social media-driven echo chamber for their own gain. We have a gutter press in this country, and the fans are mistaken if they think they’ll fight for anything to do with her freedom. In fact, in this case the silence is what is most deafening to those of us with a balanced judgement. The dignified silence from the court attenders in the thread who have explained the semantics of LLs behaviour, but upheld the dignity of the victims and their families. The relative silence of Judith, Dan and Mark considering that they probably all covered the biggest case of their respective careers. I’m so sorry that the families and the staff members have had to deal with this behaviour from the fans, it’s genuinely sickening - we can all have an ‘opinion’ but trying to disrupt court, people’s careers, or targeting the families simply is simply nonsensical. I’ll just leave it here. No matter on where you stand on the scale of 0-guilty with Lucy Letby, if she was released and back to work tomorrow I can guarantee not one person would leave their newborn or child with her. There may not be the smoking gun that I alluded to earlier, but when you understand the context of healthcare and the context of the courtroom in a case like this, there doesn’t need to be. She was proven guilty by 8 months of evidence, by people who considered the mounds of evidence so carefully that they didn’t return a verdict unless they were certain. Mistakes happened but any one of those nurses or doctors who recognised mistakes and stood up in court to discuss their role in these deaths are braver than most of us could ever be. It genuinely saddens me that we live in a society where we’d rather a trial by social media where we consider our own opinions/beliefs to be more important than the actual evidence that helped to convict a sadistic baby murderer.”
“The posts in recent days about the dire care from the CoCH has made it click as to what helped me come to terms with LL’s guilt before we heard everything in court the first time round. Because actually yes, some of the care was absolutely awful. But awful care happens in every ward in every hospital daily. Those of us that work in a medical setting will put our hands up and say that in every shift we attend we notice something suboptimal and that’s not an exaggeration. It could be a missed blood result, a drug not signed for, a porter attending too late to get a patient to a scan, a phone not answered. The list is endless because as we all know, the NHS is grossly underfunded and overused. Mistakes happen, usually as a result of human error and hospitals have teams of governance for this very reason. Staff are paid to attend monthly mandatory governance meetings with devoted ‘morbidity and mortality’ sessions to discuss what can be learned, even from ‘non-fault’ deaths. Doctors are taught to accept mistakes from university - they are taught in what is fondly known as a ‘shit sandwich’ method where someone senior will watch you do a procedure even as simple as taking blood and they have to tell you what you did well, what you could do better, and what to remember for next time. Even with a simple procedure you would be expected to find a constructive criticism in approach. Training and revalidation is based on discussing suboptimal care and lessons learned. Going back to this case, what stands out for me now is that things were so bad on the unit outside the scope of ‘accepted error’ in a health care environment. Babies are linear, fairly logical patients. The complications when they are born are essentially due to their prematurity, something genetic or in-utero complications, or a problem because of their prematurity ie brain or breathing complications, metabolic imbalance. Babies don’t come in with chest pain but forget to say they’d snorted 2g the night before. They haven’t smoked 20 a day for 40 years. They fit a certain number of logical patterns. There are of course always babies that break the rules, and may behave differently to anticipated but then let us factor in the staffing in hospitals. All patients in hospitals have the privilege of having a fresh set of eyes on them at most every 12 hours, someone who might interpret the data differently even if the previous nurse or doctor didn’t see it. This helps to safeguard the patients from the above mentioned ‘human error’. So what was it that made this unit have outcomes so much worse that what is expected even in the context of human error? It was the presence of one specific human at each extreme case. I remember a discussion last year about whether she could have just been a ‘bad’ nurse. Having someone as ‘unlucky’ as a LL, even if she was just an awful nurse, is basically statistically impossible because of all of the safeguarding measures around them - even in the most busy or deprived hospitals worldwide, individual healthcare staff members are protected from human error by the training, protocols and colleagues around them. The whole ‘lack of forensic evidence’ thing is exhausting. A serial killer is smart enough to know that hospitals incinerate their waste daily. A medical serial killer is also smart enough to choose causes of death that don’t have an identifiable clinical element to them - non specific bleeding, air emboli, hiding insulin in plain sight (which is undisputed by the defence). So what evidence is there? Evidence of times being changed in the notes, evidence of obsessional behaviour towards the victims. Evidence of the same person being in direct contact with the non specific cause of death. Speak to anyone you know who works in healthcare, and they’ll tell you of the absolute terror in realising you’ve left a handover sheet in your pocket - it guarantees a sleepless night until the following shift when you can take it in and return it to the confidential waste. It could jeopardise the career you’ve worked so hard for, just a single sheet of paper - not even a box full at your parents house. Ask the same people about memorable sick people. They most likely won’t remember a name, but they’ll remember what bed they were in and who else was there. They certainly won’t know their family members names two years on. Moving on to calls around a miscarriage of justice, let me say this. The day LL walked in to court, she was innocent until she was proven to be guilty. And she was proven to be guilty but not on all counts, as we well know. That courtroom heard evidence beyond what almost all of us could imagine, and the one positive from the NG verdicts or the hung verdicts is that the jurors did in fact consider every bit of evidence pointed to them for the guilty cases. Hats off to the jurors who felt there wasn’t the burden of evidence in some cases and voted NG because to me, that absolutely solidifies the guilty verdicts as well proven in court. Those that blame the jurors or the legal teams need to answer why she wasn’t found unanimously guilty on all counts if it was such a miscarriage of justice. The Judge, who knows certainly more than even the jurors pulled no punches in either of his sentencing remarks - why could he confidently instruct the juries as he did, and make remarks as he did if there were doubts? The man could barely look at her. The clickbait articles will pass, and are a sad reflection of society today. When the original trial was underway, you all know that I had occasional ‘what if’ moments, not doubting her actions but actually comprehending the scale of her actions. LL was an attractive, smiling, privileged white woman working in a secure public sector job. Yes, it is unthinkable that she could do what she is now guilty of doing. What attracts the social media fans? Being different? Having attention on Twitter/facebook? Or a naïve outlook on the world not comprehending that LL has a severe mental illness behind the once-shiny facade. That handsome doctor that delivered those babies, and held peoples hands during their troubles? That was Dr Shipman. That kind smiling nurse who hugged/cared for those peoples daughters or sisters, and was regarded as part of her patients families? That was Beverley Allitt. Here’s where LL shows even more of what kind of person she is beyond that exterior. She knows about the people supporting her online, something we haven’t seen with previous generations of serial killers. Let’s allow ourselves to be distracted by her disgusting shouting ‘I’m innocent’ on Friday, what else did we expect her to shout? But it wasn’t about the words she used, it’s about the shouting. She wanted the last word. She wanted the headline. She wanted to hurt parents more on the day when their recovery should be allowed to start. She couldn’t steal the headline about not attending court so she wanted to steal it in another way. She wanted it to be all about her - where have we seen that before? In every text message she’s sent that was released and in the post it notes - that’s where. And so if there was ever any personal doubt about the context of her messages or notes, please refer yourself to her ‘I’m innocent’ outburst. This outburst seeks to have gained her a possibility of sympathy from the press via her die hard fans.. but that’s what the press have craved for 18 months. Positive or negative headline, they wanted the clicks generated from a modern day female serial killer. And because there was no ‘smoking gun’ for the headline, they use the sensationalist social media-driven echo chamber for their own gain. We have a gutter press in this country, and the fans are mistaken if they think they’ll fight for anything to do with her freedom. In fact, in this case the silence is what is most deafening to those of us with a balanced judgement. The dignified silence from the court attenders in the thread who have explained the semantics of LLs behaviour, but upheld the dignity of the victims and their families. The relative silence of Judith, Dan and Mark considering that they probably all covered the biggest case of their respective careers. I’m so sorry that the families and the staff members have had to deal with this behaviour from the fans, it’s genuinely sickening - we can all have an ‘opinion’ but trying to disrupt court, people’s careers, or targeting the families simply is simply nonsensical. I’ll just leave it here. No matter on where you stand on the scale of 0-guilty with Lucy Letby, if she was released and back to work tomorrow I can guarantee not one person would leave their newborn or child with her. There may not be the smoking gun that I alluded to earlier, but when you understand the context of healthcare and the context of the courtroom in a case like this, there doesn’t need to be. She was proven guilty by 8 months of evidence, by people who considered the mounds of evidence so carefully that they didn’t return a verdict unless they were certain. Mistakes happened but any one of those nurses or doctors who recognised mistakes and stood up in court to discuss their role in these deaths are braver than most of us could ever be. It genuinely saddens me that we live in a society where we’d rather a trial by social media where we consider our own opinions/beliefs to be more important than the actual evidence that helped to convict a sadistic baby murderer.”
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) That’s another thing that stands out actually, she obviously wasn’t liked or she would have been fast tracked with all that overtime and study.
