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.
“But it was during that 11 months after Lucy Letby was moved off the unit, before the police got involved, that it was a very difficult atmosphere, very tense, very stressful dealing with the managers,” he added.
Managers “were determined to ensure that we accepted Lucy Letby had been wrongly suspected of doing any harm,” the senior doctor explained.
He also spoke of the failures of his and his wider team, specifically referencing a doctor who disregarded blood test results that suggested a baby had been poisoned with insulin in August 2015.
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.
“Others of us were on call and covering the neonatal unit over the next week or two before the baby moved out of the unit. We all had the opportunity to review the notes.”
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.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), an independent body set up to examine potential miscarriages of justice, is currently reviewing her convictions.