Chester hospital: Nurse Lucy Letby poisoned babies in with insulin; trial told
Lucy Letby has been accused of murdering five baby boys and two girls and attempting to murder ten other babies at Countess of Chester hospital.
Nick Johnson KC, prosecuting, said she was a "constant malevolent presence" in the hospital's neonatal unit.
Ms Letby, 32, of Hereford, denies 22 charges at Manchester Crown Court.
Jurors heard Ms Letby is alleged to have tried to kill one child three times, while another died due to being injected with air.
Family members of some of the babies concerned in the case were present in the court as Mr Johnson opened the prosecution.
He said the Chester institution was a "busy general hospital like many others in the UK".
However, he said that "unlike many other hospitals, within the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, a poisoner was at work".
“Before January 2015, the statistics for the mortality of babies in the neo-natal unit at the Countess of Chester were comparable to other like units," he said.
"However, over the next 18 months or so, there was a significant rise in the number of babies who were dying and in the number of serious catastrophic collapses."
He said the increases were noticed by hospital consultants, who were concerned that "babies who were dying had deteriorated unexpectedly".
Medics also noted that babies who had collapsed "did not respond to appropriate and timely resuscitation" and that others "collapsed dramatically, but then, equally dramatically, recovered".
"Having searched for a cause, which they were unable to find, the consultants noticed that the inexplicable collapses and deaths did have one common denominator," he said.
"The presence of one of the neonatal nurses and that nurse was Lucy Letby."
Mr Johnson told the court that as medics could not account for the collapses and deaths, police were called in and conducted a "painstaking review".
"That review suggests in the period between mid-2015 and the middle of 2016, somebody in the neonatal unit poisoned two children with insulin," he said.
"The prosecution say the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from the evidence you will hear is that somebody poisoned these babies deliberately with insulin."
Among several cases detailed by the barrister, he told the jury that both babies were boys and both born as twins - but not to each other - and were poisoned within a few days of being born.
Mr Johnson said their blood sugar levels dropped to dangerous levels.
But the babies - identified only as child F and child L - survived due to the skill of medical staff who appreciated low blood sugar can have natural causes, he said.
"What the medical staff did not realise was that in both cases, was the result of someone poisoning them with insulin," he added.
The prosecutor said nobody would think somebody would be trying to kill babies in a neonatal unit.
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