Nursing-behaviour baseline — what 'normal' NICU nursing actually looks like
Prosecution claim
The Crown's case relied on a series of inferences that specific aspects of Lucy Letby's professional behaviour were anomalous or sinister: she was on more shifts than some of her colleagues, she retained handover sheets at home, she searched medical information online, she attended the funerals of babies she had cared for, she followed up on families of babies on social media. Each of these, the Crown implied, fell outside normal nursing practice.
Counter-evidence
Each of the behaviours the Crown framed as anomalous is, on independent nursing testimony and published professional guidance, within normal range for a young, committed UK NICU nurse. Shift attendance distribution is always skewed — somebody works more unsociable shifts than others. Handover sheet retention at home was, under NHS confidentiality training, the advised alternative to disposing of sheets in ordinary ward bins. Clinical-information searching is required by the NMC revalidation framework. Attending families' funerals is a recognised nursing-grief practice. Social-media follow-up is common and not pathological. Independent nurse-witnesses at the Thirlwall Inquiry and in published commentary have said the Crown's framing misrepresents ordinary NICU-nursing behaviour.
If you assess any committed young NICU nurse against the curated subset the prosecution showed the jury, they look like Letby. That is not because committed NICU nurses are all guilty of something. It is because the sampling frame was designed to pick out ordinary behaviour and frame it as sinister.
What the jury heard
The jury heard the specific behaviours the Crown selected. It did not hear systematic comparison to the base rate of the same behaviours across the NICU nursing workforce.
What the Panel says
The Panel's remit is medical, not behavioural, but its finding that medical evidence of deliberate harm is absent removes the foundational pattern the behavioural evidence was meant to support.
What independent experts add
- UK NMC revalidation requires all nurses to demonstrate continuing professional development including reading, learning, and reflection on patient cases — the 'preparation' evidence is structurally what this requires.
- NHS confidentiality training instructs nurses not to dispose of patient-identifiable documents in ordinary ward bins; retention at home is the safer alternative.
- Nursing grief practice including attending funerals and follow-up with families is discussed in nursing professional literature as a recognised and healthy response — not pathological.
- Social-media use by nurses is very common; the Letby Facebook subset is a fraction of her overall activity.
- Independent nurses writing publicly about the case since 2024 have described the Crown's behavioural framings as misrepresenting ordinary NICU practice.
- The Thirlwall Inquiry record includes nursing-witness testimony from Powell, Bissell, Farmer and others describing Letby as a competent and caring colleague — not a nurse displaying anomalous behaviour.