Investigative journalism
Private Eye — M.D. column
Private Eye’s long-running medical column, M.D., is written by Dr Phil Hammond. He has been writing regularly about the Lucy Letby case since 2023, and was among the first UK journalists to raise systematic questions about the medical evidence.
Why Private Eye’s coverage matters: M.D. is one of the few UK mainstream outlets that raised sustained, substantive medical-evidence concerns in print during the period when much of the press had moved on. The column is cited throughout the post-conviction review material and in academic commentary.
Private Eye is a paid print magazine and does not publish its columns free online. This page summarises the column’s published coverage in our own words. Readers wanting the full text should buy the magazine; back-issue summaries (not full-text) are maintained by lucyletbyinnocence.com.
Column coverage, in rough chronological order
Oct 2023
M.D. raises the air-embolism question
The M.D. column's earliest published piece foregrounding the air-embolism diagnostic problem — that the skin signs described at trial did not match the Lee & Tanswell criteria the Crown relied on.
Nov 2023
The insulin test and the forensic-use gap
M.D. sets out why a Roche immunoassay screening result, uncorroborated by confirmatory testing, is not normally treated as forensic proof of exogenous insulin.
Early 2024
Dr Dewi Evans and the courts
M.D. reports the 2023 family-court characterisation of a separate Evans report as 'worthless', and the chronology of Dr Evans's own approach to Cheshire Police before formal instruction.
Mid-2024
Statistics and the Lucia de Berk parallel
M.D. walks readers through Prof. Richard Gill's de Berk-parallel argument and the selection-bias problem with the shift-rota chart.
Late 2024 – 2025
Unit conditions: the other story
A sustained M.D. sequence on understaffing, the pharmacy and plumbing incidents, and what Datix records showed about the Countess of Chester neonatal unit in 2015–16.
Feb 2025
The Shoo Lee Panel press conference — M.D. reports
Contemporaneous M.D. coverage of the 14-member international panel press conference and its unanimous case-by-case finding of no medical evidence of deliberate harm.
2025 ongoing
The CCRC application and the Thirlwall Inquiry
Rolling coverage of the October 2025 CCRC application and the 2024–2026 Thirlwall hearings.
Who is Dr Phil Hammond?
Dr Phil Hammond is a GP, NHS-safety campaigner and long-standing writer. He has written the M.D. column in Private Eye for more than twenty years. He first came to wider public attention for his reporting on the Bristol heart-surgery scandal in the 1990s — another NHS case in which clinicians repeatedly raised safety concerns that management was slow to escalate.