Lucy Letby was known as "nurse death" at the NHS hospital where she murdered babies, an inquiry has heard.
But concerns about a spike in baby deaths were not discussed at hospital board level until after the year-long attack spree of "elephant in the room" Letby had ended, the public inquiry heard today.
The nurse was removed from non-clinical duties after the deaths of two triplet boys and the suspected collapse of another boy at the Countess of Chester Hospital's neonatal unit on three successive days in June 2016.
Consultant paediatricians had urged executives to move Letby, 34, out of the unit on the grounds of "patient safety" after a number of them had previously raised fears about her.
But the inquiry later heard from Nicholas de la Poer KC, the barrister speaking on behalf of the counsel to the inquiry, who said junior doctors at the hospital were referring to Letby as "nurse death’" by September 2016. The barrister told the inquiry the revelation came from an interview the review team conducted with former Countess of Chester Hospital medical director Dr Ian Harvey.
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Dr Harvey said during this initial interview that he had had to "intervene with the neonatal lead" over the nickname given to Letby, De la Poer told the inquiry in Liverpool.
Less than a fortnight later an extraordinary meeting of the board of directors was held in which chief executive Tony Chambers informed them there had been an unexplained increase in neonatal mortality at the hospital trust.
The official minutes recorded Dr Ravi Jayaram, clinical lead for paediatric services, asking for one matter not to be minuted. In a set of handwritten notes, the consultant set out Letby's association with neonatal deaths and referred to her as "the elephant in (the) room". The inquiry is being told about a review in 2016 of the ward conducted by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
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