The Invisible Dr. V

Who is she?

19th December 2024

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Or as, in 1867, John Stuart Mill originally coined the phrase:

‘... let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion … ‘

I have focussed quite a bit on the part Ravi Jayaram and Stephen Brearey have played in destroying Lucy, and also the role played by Dewi Evans, but there are others in the background of this shit show who have so far avoided too much criticism. They’ve served the institution as is expected of them, towed the line and allowed this sinister framing of Lucy to continue. They turned their heads and their backs until Lucy was finally nailed to the cross to save them from their sins. They should be very grateful to her. I do have to wonder though, would they have gone this far if we had the death sentence in Blighty? No reason to suppose they wouldn’t.

I believe at least one nurse was prevented from giving evidence to support Lucy, and there may have been others that were silenced who were willing to fight her corner. But when it came to the doctors and consultants, they all seemed only to willing to let Lucy take the rap for their negligence, and lack of medical skills. Whilst the COCH management ultimately facilitated the sacrifice of Lucy to save their own reputations and avoid hefty negligence payouts.

Why did all the doctors though, either join the baying mob or bury their heads in the sand. They knew they were keeping quiet about errors they themselves had made. Consultants had even pointed out to management that the consultant numbers were so low (two visits a week instead of the required two visits a day) that a disaster was waiting to happen. They outlined it.

a disaster is waiting to happen

Yet when the disaster did happen ,they just couldn’t see a reason other than a psycho bitch nurse killer.

I have touched a little before on Dr. A/U, the registrar Lucy is supposed to have been having some kind of relationship with, albeit denied by both of them as being just a friendship,. He was around for some of the deaths and collapses and was part of resuscitation teams that made errors sometimes with serious consequences. But I want to concentrate in this article on the consultant who at the trial was called Dr. B but is now called Dr. V at the Inquiry. This woman has been granted anonymity. It is unclear why, given that as far as I know she is not a gang member in a major drugs bust, or an intelligence asset. Personally I think that if you are going to give evidence against your own colleague which will likely destroy her whole life, you should have the guts to show your face. But maybe that’s just me.

The reason for Dr. V’s invisibility becomes clear when you find out she accidentally killed a baby, little Noah Robinson, at the COCH neonatal unit in 2014. Award-winning investigate journalist, John Sweeney and Edward Abel Smith on their podcast, outline how this baby’s life came to an end when Dr. V inserted a breathing tube in the wrong place, so pumping air down the baby’s oesophagus into his stomach. This was after a junior doctor/registrar whom she was supervising, had made the same error. Apparently it is not difficult to make this mistake in neonates but there are warning signs which were not taken heed of.

There is a negligence claim against Dr. V by the parents of Noah. During Lucy’s grievance procedure Erian Powell, neonatal ward manager, put in a four page report. This was only partly released to the inquiry. Page 3 was redacted. This is where she states

‘Dr. V accidentally killed a baby once and now Brearey has a gut feeling and wants Lucy suspended….there was evidence in that case yet Dr. V was not suspended ...’

Dr. V was involved in resuscitating baby B (the twin sister of baby A). When she apparently was doing this she claims that she had no knowledge that baby A had died the day before. This would have been very important information that should have been available to her, and it just illustrates the chaos on the unit . How the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, and frankly it seems the left hand doesn’t even know what the left hand is doing. This may not be any one particular person’s fault. When people are overworked and overstretched, they are going to get confused and make mistakes. The problem with the NHS is that no one ever comes clean when they have done a bodged job. This is dangerous. Learning from your mistakes is how you gain experience. Denying them leaves you in ignorance. Dr. V was also involved in the care of the two babies which were part of triplets, babies O and P. These were identical boys and they shared a placenta. Their mother entered labour at 33 weeks and two days. She had a C-section.

Dewi Evans claimed baby O was attacked and injured three times and that air was injected into the feeding tube by Letby, causing him to vomit and making his stomach swell. At 1.15 pm on June 23rd 2016, Dr. A was called. Baby O’s heart rate and breathing were slightly elevated . Dr. A ordered blood tests in case of infection. Later on Dr. A was called back and found the baby’s skin very mottled. He put an oxygen mask on Baby O and moved him, then decided to intubate and put the baby on a ventilator

The baby had an apnea (Pause in breathing) and Brearey offered to help. Dr. V was also present. However they put the ventilator on too high a pressure setting. But ventilation was unnecessary anyway, according to the neonatologist Richard Taylor, as there was no lung disease. Richard Taylor has in fact just taken part in a press conference organised by Lucy’s new barrister Mark McDonald. He has looked carefully at what happened with baby O. There was an unusual rash on the right side of chest. Also a rash on the belly and stomach swelling. A doctor responded to this by putting a needle into the right abdomen. This was intended to aspirate but it was inserted in the wrong place. Instead of aspirating air, the doctor aspirated blood. The needle was in the wrong side and it perforated the liver. The liver had dropped down into the pelvis due to the ventilator being on too high pressure setting. So there was bleeding from the liver into the abdomen. The needle aspirate should have been done on the left side. This crucial piece of info which was in the records was somehow not brought up at trial . Eventually Baby O was given repeated doses of adrenalin. Five doctors were trying to save him. There were five medics present. Brearey, Dr. V, Dr. A, Dr. Gibbs and Dr. Cook. Sadly he passed away at 5pm.

Buy me a Kofi

Mark McDonald's Press Conference

Richard Taylor got his information from a report which contains what is in the medical records. He says the doctor who did this damage which led to the baby O death knows who they are. The pathologist was not told about this fatal attempted aspiration. It is not clear which of the 5 doctors did the damage to the liver. But the baby died from shock from a liver perforation. When Dr. V spoke to the parents of baby O, after his death, the father got the impression that although she was upset , she seemed to be the one in charge.

Tellingly when Lucy Letby was asked during the trial if she had harmed baby O, she replied

‘It wasn’t me’.

That sounds like she knew somebody had harmed him, ie which doctor put the aspiration needle on the wrong side of the abdomen.

In a report Dewi Evans wrote in 2018, he said the rash on Baby O could be due to bruising linked to the liver damage. But later he changed his story and Ben Myers accused him of chopping and changing theories in the trial. Evans claimed he had changed his mind about the rash in 2019 after he discovered it had vanished before baby Os death. He claimed this would not have happened if it had been caused by internal bleeding or bruising. Dewi was by then claiming air had been injected into the blood circulation causing the rash. Dewi changes his mind quite a bit as both Lucy’s barristers have pointed out.

Stephen Brearey was asked during the trial if he had any concerns about baby O following the death, but he claimed no natural cause could be found for the death. He claimed all triplets were in good condition at birth and that it was exceptionally unusual that baby O had had two drops in oxygen levels and heart rate when on the ventilator. He described the rash as nothing he had ever seen before.

Dr. V was also part of the team trying to save Baby P the next day. Baby P is one of the babies that Dewi Evans has changed his mind on cause of death (along with baby C and baby I) . In this video interview with The Sun, Dewi actually admits as much and he also announces that that the schedule which the prosecution used to frame letby is not evidence of anything

Dewi Evans Sun interview -Lucy Letby the Case for Innocence - you tube

Well that’s good to know, since it was that schedule that the whole prosecution was based upon. So it is very timely of Dewi to wait till after the trial to point out that the schedule is fit for little more than toilet paper. That apparently it was only produced in court for presumably decorative purposes??

In the trial Dewi claimed Lucy injected air into baby P, causing embolism. However there are of course far more plausible reasons for the death. At. 9.30am on 24th June, registrar Tony Ukko reviewed baby P on his ward round. He noted the abdomen as being swollen and the baby had slightly mottled skin . After he had left and around 10 minutes later, the baby suffered a serious collapse. The heart rate and oxygen plummeted. The prosecution claimed that Lucy injected air after Tony Ukko had reviewed baby P and in the 10 minutes before the collapse. This ignores the already swollen abdomen and mottling that Tony Ukko had witnessed. Bearing that in mind, although I am not medically trained, I would suspect that whatever caused the baby’s collapse was most likely already under way. There was no need for Lucy to start reciting spells, boiling toads or anything else. All she needed to do was wait for the team. Dr. A arrived and so did Dr. V. Repeated attempts were made to resuscitate and the baby was put on a ventilator which he was fighting against. He was also given adrenalin. Calls were made to transfer him to the specialist hospital. They discovered baby P had a small puncture in his right lung. Did they , like they had with baby O, set the ventilator pressure too high? They inserted a needle to try to remove some of the air which was causing his lung to collapse. At 3pm a chest drain was inserted by doctor A to try to resolve the puncture

The mother witnessed the scene. She describes a younger female doctor sitting at a small computer outside Nursery 2 googling what she said looked like a relatively simple procedure, inserting a line into the chest. She was told this needed to be done because baby Ps lungs had collapsed during CPR.

Dr. V has a question that she says Lucy asked stuck in her head. This was while they were waiting for transport to get baby P out of this hell hole of a hospital. She states that Lucy said:

‘He’s not leaving here alive is he?’

Dr. V claims to have been very disturbed by what she describes as this inappropriate statement from Lucy. Well firstly it is a question, not a statement and when you consider that this baby had undergone two resuscitations and obviously needed to be transferred urgently for a reason, and that transport from that unit was routinely delayed, it is not surprising that Lucy thought he might not make it. It is very possible she had seen mistakes by the doctors, tubes, lines, needles in wrong places, ventilators on wrong settings etc. etc. She also may well have been aware of Dr. V’s history of having accidentally killed another baby and perhaps did not trust her abilities. But it is unlikely such a remark would be distressing for Dr. V unless she felt they had done something wrong.. The reason this remark stands out in Dr. V’s mind is likely due to her own past tragic mistake which killed baby Noah. Perhaps fear that she had again done something in error which would lead to the death of another baby.

Dr. V goes on to claim that it was inappropriate for Lucy to ask the parents of of baby P if they wanted her to make a memory box like she had done for baby O the day before. The parents were grateful for this offer by Lucy, but still Dr. V saw it as inappropriate. I fail to see why acting like a human being and offering to perhaps ease the parents grief in any way she can is inappropriate. Surely it is better than being cold, clinical and uncaring as many medical staff unfortunately turn out to be.

Dr V also claims Lucy was excited and animated but if any of the doctors involved in Baby P’s care had made mistakes, then it may be that Lucy’s presentation was exaggerated in her mind, perhaps her energy appearing even threatening to to the mind of Dr. V who may have been struggling with her own inadequacies. Of course animated behaviour by Lucy could have just been down to Lucy’s own anxieties, which may have been very real considering the spout of deaths that had occurred on the unit in the preceding months culminating in baby O’s death the day before. IN any case any memories that Dr. V has of Lucy, seven years after the events are going to be unreliable and will also have been coloured by the claims that have been made against Lucy by the other consultants. It is also important that Dr. V’s memories of Lucy at that time are different from the parents of the triplets. They remembered her as being helpful in making the memory boxes etc and also that Lucy was in floods of tears. The mother remembers that Dr. V coughed into her own hands and then continued working on one of her babies without washing them and this concerned her enough to report it.

So who is telling the truth about Lucy’s attitude and behaviour? The parents, who have no vested interest in particularly saddling Lucy with the blame, or Dr. V who already has a negligence claim against her because she accidentally killed a baby before by inserting a a breathing tube in the wrong place?

IN fact Dr. V goes on to describe how she thought the third triplet, Baby R would die next and this prompted her to support the triplet’s father when he begged for Baby R to be transported out of the hospital with baby P.. This father had already seen too much of the incompetence of staff and chaos of the unit. .When Dr. Rackham arrived to take baby P away to Liverpool Womens’ Hospital, the father describes feeling he was an assuring presence whose professionalism seemed way above that of the COCH staff. The father was desperate to get the third triplet away from Countess of Chester and into the safer hands of Dr. Rackham. Dr. Rackham did arrange for baby P and baby R to go together, but unfortunately it was too late for baby P who died before he could escape.

Dr. V was questioned at the Inquiry about a conversation she had with Christine Hurst at the coroners’ office on 27^th June. Christine Hurst’s recollection was that Dr. V was ‘naturally very upset’. But when Hurst asked who was on duty at the time of the collapses of babies O and P, she states that Dr. V’s tone changed and became short and she replied defensively:

‘what do you mean? Don’t you think my colleagues and I are distressed enough without you implying that someone may have done something?’

Dr. V denies she said this but then goes into a long diatribe trying to explain why she is denying she had this awkward interaction with the coroners officer. But it is important to note here that in her statement Dr. V had stated she had grave concerns regarding the death of both baby O and baby P, yet she did not relay those concerns to the coroner. She goes on in her diatribe to surmise what she claims she would have said if she had responded to a question from Mrs Hurst. This would be along the lines of:

‘… well I can’t explain what has happened. I was there for both of them. Dr. U was there for both of them. And she (Lucy) was there for both of them ..’

Her over-explaining is indicative of attempts to hide something. She had no need to do this, needing only to answer the questions put to her. She claims that she did not mention suspicions she had around {presumably Lucy} to Christine Hurst because she wanted to be in a safer space with her colleagues where she could assess what other people were thinking.

This implies two things. Either Dr. V needs her beliefs, thoughts and opinions to be given to her by others, lacking faith in her own judgement, or she just desperately needed to know whether others were perhaps picking up on her errors. She had previously admitted that she herself had no suspicion that Letby had deliberately harmed babies. She also knew that at least with Baby O, serious errors had been made, by either herself or Brearey, or Dr. U, Dr. Cook or Dr. Booth or the other of the five doctors present at baby Os collapses.

She also states that she had no evidence to support any suspicion against Letby being another reason she did not inform Christine Hurst as she claimed coroners only need to know facts. This is absurd since coroners investigate deaths and therefore take statements from people which will contain both facts and opinion, albeit the composer of the witness statement is required to be honest and to clearly differentiate between what is fact and what is opinion. This of course is a confusing subject since there is always a grey area when memory is involved and there are different interpretations of ‘fact’. Whether or not there are objective facts at all is a question made very real by quantum theory where nothing is set in stone. Reproducibility becomes very important. But agreed facts today become tomorrow’s blind ignorance. We are as human beings very limited in our knowledge and humility is of profound important in seeking ‘truth’. I myself am not a believer in absolutes, but for anyone who is seeking truth it is good to remember the words of Robert Pirsig (author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)

‘The truth knocks on the door one day and you say ‘go away I’m looking for the truth.’ So it goes away. Puzzling’.

How often is the truth staring us in the face but we just do not want to see it. This is what I believe is happening with some of these doctors at COCH. The truth of the matter was plastered all over that unit in the filthy sinks, backing up pipes, the lack of consultant cover , the exhausted , overworked staff, the unit being upgraded to take babies for which the staff did not have the expertise to treat, the lack of good record keeping, older more qualified nurses got rid of due to cost cutting , lack of one to one nursing for neonates, lack of suitable equipment etc. etc.

Dr. V made her signed statement to the coroner on 3/11/16. By then there had been open discussions about the suspicions regarding Lucy and she had been removed from the unit and had been on permanent leave since 1/7/2016. I take from this that Dr. V did not really believe Lucy had murdered any babies or she would have informed the coroner at least of a suspicion. She didn’t have to mention names.

On 26/1/17 there was a meeting with management and consultants. Prior to that meeting Dr. V had spoken to Dr. David Semple who is an experience gynacologist and obstetrician. He told her to keep quiet in the meeting telling her:

‘the executives don’t have very good plans about you, so I would suggest you just keep quiet in the meeting and sit it out’.

He also said that ‘heads would roll’

Dr. V claimed Tony Chambers and Ian Harvey were very angry and aggressive in the meeting to the point of being scary and intimidating. But why would Dr. V’s head roll? Is it because having already accidentally killed baby Noah in 2014 the management considered she had made more mistakes which could have led to more deaths? It seems that with Baby O someone lacerated the liver as outlined above. It seems that it is likely to have been Brearey or Dr. V , being the consultants present

I believe I was the first person to question the Letby verdict on the day after she had been found guilty in the first hearing of multiple murders. On 19^th August 2023 I rang up the MSM and got through to Talk Radio onto Rene Honderkeampf and David Bull morning show. Rene laid into me of course but I stood my ground. Then very soon after Mark Macdonald lawyer got through and said he thought the same as me, but they had to hear him out as they could not dismiss him in the predictable fashion they dismissed me as a layman. AT that time almost everybody was viciously attacking Lucy as a an evil witch.

From what I have heard of the trial and from listening to police interviews with Lucy Letby one thing struck me. She appears very genuine and very honest. She doesn’t obfuscate. She gives straight answers to straight questions. Conversely when I listen to evidence of some of her accusers, I see something not quite sure of itself, not quite right. Something lurking in the shadows.

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