Allitt report derided as 'cover-up': Parents and medical staff say serial killer inquiry inadequate

ALL the warning signs were there, but no one noticed a common thread - the criticism levelled at Beverly Allitt's colleagues on Ward 4 will be made against the inquiry into her serial killing.

Creswen Peasgood, whose baby son Christopher was attacked twice by nurse Allitt, summarised the scepticism felt yesterday by parents and medical staff.

'They have only told us what they want us to know,' she said. 'We still feel the truth is being hidden from us. It is a cover-up which we feared all along. They have got rid of the nurses and the doctors but we have not seen anything happen to the management.'

The three-member inquiry met 35 times, interviewed 94 witnesses, but did not materially change the narrative of serial killing which has emerged since her trial last year.

Student nurse Allitt was a mess. She went 50 times to doctors. She inflicted injuries on herself and imagined illness. Her physiotherapist, astonished to learn she was a pupil nurse, told the authorities. They knew she had a disorder based on hysteria. They hired her to work on the children's ward. No other ward would take her; she had been a poor student.

She made at least 26 attacks on at least 13 children during 58 days. Four of the attacks were made after laboratory tests proved one child had been injected poisonously with insulin. Mistakes had earlier been made in autopsies; other clues, revealed in X-rays, did not cause doctors and nurses to deduce that a criminal was on the ward in nurse's uniform - that 'mischief was afoot', as the inquiry report said yesterday. Even when detectives were called, Trent Regional Health Authority, the apex of a management structure characterised by inertia, said they had been brought in as soon as clues had emerged. In fact, proof of the deadly insulin injection had arrived 18 days earlier.

The parents of Allitt's victims and the doctors and nurses accept that mistakes were made, although individuals believe the report burdens some individuals with an unfair load of guilt.

The inquiry details an over- worked staff trying to cope on a shoe-string budget. Desperate for a qualified nurse who could not be found, they employed Allitt.

'All the ingredients of a fair and balanced report are there,' a lawyer involved with the case said. 'But the inquiry doesn't tie them all together. It says there should have been an inter-disciplinary meeting to discuss the exceptional number of cases, but how were staff supposed to communicate when there weren't enough of them?'

The inquiry says there were too few nurses on Ward 4. It reports the doctors' complaints of excessive workloads. It does not dispute the assessment of a children's ward operating with about half the staff of professionals it needed. And it makes the remarkable comment that Grantham district hospital, 'on the borderline of viability', is a hospital which, if kept open for reasons of local need and civic pride, may have to expect under-staffing.

Sir Cecil Clothier QC, who chaired the inquiry, yesterday said the issue of staffing was 'tangential . . . a peripheral issue'. A determined criminal like Allitt could still have achieved her purpose even if the specialised work to which she was allocated had been carried out by properly trained nurses.

'If that is Clothier's conclusion, what would he have said if there had been a deadly and mysterious virus on the ward?' the lawyer said. 'Is he saying it would still have satisfied its urge? Virginia Bottomley said the doctors should have stopped and taken stock of what was happening. They said they had tried in the past to hold meetings, but many colleagues were too busy to attend.'

(Photographs omitted)