LL Part 19: Updated Staff Involvement Scorecard

Can we do better than an X/Y Plot?

Following on from our previous article in the Lucy Letby Trial series here.

All the way back in Part 12 I proposed that we keep our own Staff Involvement Scorecard (SIS) that, unlike the one presented by the police and prosecution during the trial, should also include the doctors. That first edition scorecard identified the minimum number of staff that had been involved in providing diagnostic and treatment care to babies A through D.

I can now update the scorecard with additional information from my review of events described for the twins, Babies E and F.

As you can see there are many staff members who cross paths with each neonate. However, you should bear in mind that these are just the bare minimum who interacted with each baby. Each cross simply identifies a staff member who was identified or mentioned during testimony or in the many clinical exhibits as having been present or involved in care. There will have been other staff members on duty who may have been present, witnessed, or assisted with each neonate’s care whose names were not mentioned during the trial.

The Extended Staff Involvement Scorecard (e-SIS)

The basic X/Y correlation plot is a simple two-dimensional statistical table. It tells us nothing about the degree of involvement each staff member had with the neonates they correlate to. For this reason I investigated different solutions for providing a third dimension - approaches for identifying and providing more contextual knowledge regarding the care each staff member provided and their involvement in the events that were portrayed during the trial as having been caused by Lucy Letby.

In order to rank and score each staff member’s involvement I developed the following scoring system:

Each staff member’s interaction with a neonate is given a score from 1 to 5 based on the degree of complexity and control they had over the selection or conduct of treatment during either the shift where a death or harm even occured, or the previous shifts during which the evidence shows the neonate’s condition as deteriorating. Lowest scores are for those staff who were merely present, observed or provided minimal assistance in delivery of the baby’s care.

Using this involvement score we arrive at the extended staff involvement scorecard (e-SIS) below:

Again, we must accept that this is the minimum number of staff who were identified during the trial as having been present or involved in each neonate’s care. Other staff will have been on shift and may have been present or peripherally involved (at least 5-8 nurses per shift, and at least 4 doctors) however, if their presence or involvement was not disclosed during the trial then it will not appear here. Without full access to the staff roster and the clinical notes of each baby, it remains impossible to evaluate a full scorecard for each staff member.

As we can already see, and even with the sparse information we currently have, there are already doctors and nurses with scores similar to or exceeding that of Lucy Letby.

And if we plotted Sepsis on this chart…?

As we have already learned during our deep-dives into the clinical demise of each neonate, sepsis would get 5’s for every one - resulting in a cummulative score across Babies A-F of 30.

The next article in our series on the Lucy Letby Trial can be found here.