Statement from Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust re:Southport Inquiry Report

We appreciate how difficult today will be for the families of Alice, Bebe and Elsie and everyone affected by the heartbreaking events of 29th July 2024. We reiterate our deepest condolences.

Alder Hey’s sole purpose has always been to provide the best possible care for children and young people. We want to state clearly that this shocking tragedy continues to affect those directly involved in our response on that day and across our organisation as a whole. It will never be forgotten.

We welcome the publication of Sir Adrian Fulford’s report today. Alder Hey has co-operated fully with the Southport Inquiry in a spirit of total transparency and as an organisation we will now consider carefully and with humility the contents and recommendations of today’s report.

This will include any learning for our major trauma, surgical and intensive care teams who looked after the victims of the atrocity, alongside first responder colleagues.

We fully accept and apologise again for the failings highlighted within the report in relation to our children and young people’s community mental health services. Our own comprehensive internal learning review, which we submitted to the Inquiry, identified shortcomings in our systems and processes. These failings are not consistent with the standards we expect and for that we are truly sorry.

We have already implemented key actions that were identified in our review. This has led to substantial improvement being made in standards of record keeping, risk assessment, care planning and safeguarding processes, all underpinned by significant changes to our digital systems.

We will now absorb Sir Adrian’s recommendations as an organisation and put these into action as required. We will continue to learn and improve where we can, both here at Alder Hey and as part of our role in the wider children’s healthcare system.

The memories of Alice, Bebe and Elsie will stay with us always and we remain fully committed to working with our partner agencies to continuously learn together and to strengthen our services to support children, young people and their families.