Why she matters in this case
Prof. Modi is, by professional standing, one of the most senior neonatologists in the United Kingdom. She is the immediate past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health — the professional college whose 2016 service review at the Countess of Chester is itself part of the disputed record. Her public position on the safety of the Letby convictions therefore carries specific institutional weight: it is not an outsider looking in, it is an insider saying the evidence presented at trial does not match what a UK neonatology consensus would recognise as sound.
She is also the UK member of the fourteen-strong international panel Dr Shoo Lee convened. When the panel’s findings are reported, her signature is one of the reasons those findings cannot be dismissed as foreign experts who do not understand British neonatal practice.
Professional background
- Professor of Neonatal Medicine, Imperial College London.
- Past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.
- Founder and long-time director of the UK’s National Neonatal Research Database — the canonical data source for UK neonatal outcomes research.
- Author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications on neonatal medicine, outcomes research and epidemiology.
- Member of the Shoo Lee International Expert Panel that reported in February 2025.
Her position on the Letby evidence
Prof. Modi’s public commentary makes three points that are especially load-bearing:
- The clinical picture described at trial — the specific skin signs, the specific deterioration patterns, the specific “air embolism” mechanisms — does not match what a UK neonatology consensus would recognise. This is important because the Crown’s case depended on the jury accepting that the descriptions were diagnostic.
- Infants of the gestational age and acuity being cared for on the Countess of Chester unit in 2015–16 are, by their own biology, fragile. In a Level 2 unit that was routinely admitting babies below its design capacity, a cluster of deaths is a known epidemiological signal — and that signal has natural-causes explanations that the trial did not adequately canvass.
- The methodology applied by the Crown’s paediatric expert was not the methodology a modern UK neonatology review would apply. The difference between the two is the difference between the 2023 verdict and the Panel’s 2025 finding of no medical evidence of deliberate harm.
Why her voice is hard to discount
Much of the UK press coverage during 2023–24 characterised the scientific objections to the convictions as coming from outside the British neonatology mainstream. Prof. Modi — a past RCPCH president, Imperial College professor, and lead of the UK’s principal neonatal research database — is the British neonatology mainstream. That a figure of her professional standing has signed the Shoo Lee Panel’s conclusions is itself a fact about where senior UK neonatology opinion has now settled.