Why he matters in this case
Prof. Darlow is one of the senior international neonatologists who signed the Shoo Lee Panel’s February 2025 report. His professional background is specifically relevant: he founded the Australia and New Zealand Neonatal Network, one of the longest-running international neonatal outcomes registries. His professional career has been about understanding what happens in neonatal units at a population level, which is exactly the analytic frame the Letby case needed and did not receive at trial.
Professional background
- Emeritus Professor of Paediatrics, University of Otago, New Zealand.
- Founder of the Australia and New Zealand Neonatal Network (ANZNN) — the longitudinal outcomes registry for extremely preterm infants across two countries.
- Decades of peer-reviewed publication on neonatal outcomes, particularly in extremely preterm and very-low-birth-weight infants.
- Distinguished international standing as a neonatal population-outcomes researcher.
What his contribution adds
Prof. Darlow’s particular value on the Panel is his population-outcomes frame. When a Level 2 NICU admits babies at the edge of viability — 23 to 25 weeks’ gestation — that unit is, by ANZNN-registry evidence and by equivalent UK data, looking at baseline mortality rates that are simply high. A cluster of deaths on such a unit, especially one with the documented staffing and infrastructure problems of the Countess of Chester in 2015–16, is not per se a criminal signal. It is a signal that a unit is operating outside its design envelope.
His specific published work on outcomes for 23-week and 24-week infants, and on the population-level distribution of collapses and deaths on neonatal units, directly challenges the prosecution’s framing that a cluster must necessarily indicate deliberate harm.
The Australia and New Zealand Neonatal Network perspective
Prof. Darlow is the founding director of the Australian and New Zealand Neonatal Network (ANZNN), the regional national-cohort neonatal-outcome research collaboration for Oceania. His research career at the University of Otago has focused on retinopathy of prematurity, preterm-infant outcomes and the long-term follow-up of NICU graduates. His sign-on to the Panel finding brings the Oceanian institutional voice and the ANZNN-data perspective to the Panel methodology.
The Australian and New Zealand neonatal systems operate with rigorous national-cohort outcome registries comparable in quality to the Canadian and Swedish systems. ANZNN data has been used in extensive peer-reviewed research on natural-cause distributions of preterm-infant deterioration and death. Prof. Darlow’s sign-on contributes the Oceanian institutional anchor to the Panel finding.
The retinopathy-of-prematurity research career
Prof. Darlow’s research on retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is one of the canonical bodies of work on a long-term complication of preterm birth. The research methodology — long-term cohort follow-up, multivariate outcome analysis, evidence-based protocol development — is the same methodology the Panel applied to the Letby case-by-case clinical records. Prof. Darlow’s experience with this kind of clinical-evidence synthesis is what makes his sign-on substantively load-bearing rather than merely institutional.
The Otago institutional position
The University of Otago is New Zealand’s leading research-medical institution and is institutionally well-positioned to take public positions on neonatal-evidence questions. Prof. Darlow’s appointment as Emeritus Professor there carries institutional weight beyond the personal-research contribution. His sign-on is therefore not the position of a single researcher taking a personal view; it is institutionally backed by Otago’s standing in international neonatology.