Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

Ayaan Haroon’s Family Statement For our family, Sheffield Children’s Hospital vanished at the moment Ayaan needed it most. When our son required urgent, lifesaving care, the systems that existed on paper did not exist at his bedside. The leadership structures meant to protect him were nowhere to be seen. The clinicians entrusted with our child saw his deterioration and did not act. And after Ayaan died, that same absence was redirected toward us—his parents—left to navigate grief while being treated as an inconvenience. After years of pursuing answers on Ayaan’s behalf, after raising substantial funds for this hospital in his name, and after repeated formal requests for accountability, we are now told that engagement with our family should cease. For an institution that failed a dying child, the desire to close the door now is not just convenient—it is telling. Our family learned very early where we stood in this system. The Chief Executive, Ruth Brown, found it appropriate to meet us 14 months after Ayaan’s death. The Medical Director followed 21 months later, a timeline that speaks volumes about how bereaved families are valued within this socalled complaints process. When responsibility passed to the ICB, engagement only occurred after Oliver Coppard wrote twice, not because of any proactive concern for our family or for Ayaan. And Niche, over the course of three years, has met us exactly once. Even with our MP present today, the record does not change meaningful family involvement was never built into this process. It appeared only when external pressure made continued avoidance untenable. Today, Ruth Brown and Yvonne Millard are seated in this room not out of leadership or conscience, but because Sir Jim Mackey instructed them to be here. He had already written to a Minister of the Crown on 20 October, giving an assurance that was then quietly abandoned. This meeting was left to drift for months while our family waited, once again, for acknowledgment of what happened to Ayaan. It only materialised after public exposure and media scrutiny forced action. Even now, their attendance is reactive rather than principled, compelled rather than chosen—an unmistakable measure of how seriously those at the top have treated Ayaan’s suffering and the concerns of his bereaved family. That history leaves our family with a single unavoidable question—one this Trust’s executive leadership must answer today. On what conceivable basis do you believe communication or engagement with you should continue at all, after the catalogue of failures, avoidance, and institutional conduct that surrounded Ayaan’s care, followed his death, and ultimately cost him his life This is not a procedural question it is a moral one. And it is long overdue. This complaint exists only because, in the days immediately following Ayaan’s death, more than one of your own clinicians came to us—quietly, urgently, and with clear alarm. They told us his death was unexpected. They warned us that what had happened to our son was not being honestly acknowledged. They advised us to speak to the media. They urged us to seek urgent legal advice from Irwin Mitchell Solicitors. And, within days, they cautioned that Trust executives would move quickly to conceal the failures in Ayaan’s care. They were unequivocal that time mattered—that unless action was taken immediately, the truth about our son’s suffering would be buried. That warning has proved entirely accurate. What we have witnessed since is not accountability, but sustained effort to preserve a façade of competence and control—maintained, even now, by those sitting in this room. What has made our distress unbearable is that the lack of independence in this investigation was not a mistake—it was calculated, deliberate, and designed to silence us. In May 2023, when we formally requested a genuinely independent investigation provider, we were met not with dialogue, but with an ultimatum from Karen Conway of NHS England, in writing accept Niche, or be excluded entirely. Let that sink in. Our family’s right to truth, to justice for Ayaan, was conditional. This was not choice. This was coercion. Ayaan’s death, and our fight for accountability, were treated as bargaining chips. And the Trust sat silently, letting this injustice take root. This ultimatum was issued even after we explained, in painstaking detail, that our concerns were informed by the tragic experience of another bereaved family—the family of Yusuf Nazir—whose child’s death had been investigated by Niche and later revealed to be covered up. We reminded them there were at least fifteen other accredited investigation providers who could have conducted this inquiry independently. And yet, our warnings were ignored. Our family’s plea for justice for Ayaan was dismissed, sidelined, and replaced with a preselected investigator whose record screamed of bias. Once again, the system chose reputation over truth, leaving us to fight alone against an organisation that refuses to learn. I immediately escalated our concerns in writing to the Trust’s executive leadership, spelling out in no uncertain terms the gravity of what was being imposed on our family. No executive replied. That silence was deafening—and it was not neutrality. It was the first unmistakable signal that a coverup was being allowed to flourish. By doing nothing, the Trust actively endorsed the ultimatum. From that moment, independence was dead. From that moment, exclusion, defensiveness, and selfpreservation became the default. Our family’s search for truth was rendered meaningless, and Ayaan’s suffering was rendered invisible—all because this Trust prioritised protecting itself over protecting the child whose life it had already failed to save. Our concerns about Niche were not speculation—they were backed by hard evidence. Freedom of Information disclosures reveal that Niche has been handed 152 out of 265 NHS investigations over the past decade. Let that sink in over half. This is not coincidence. It is reckless, it is complacent, and it is an insult to every family who has ever trusted the NHS with a child’s life. For our family, for Ayaan, it is unforgivable. This is not about learning. This is about protecting reputations. Yours. Not ours. Not Ayaan’s. And certainly not the truth about what really happened to our son. A system that keeps returning to the same provider—year after year, despite multiple bereaved families exposing catastrophic failings, misconduct, and coverups—cannot even pretend to offer independent scrutiny. For our family, for Ayaan, this is not a “process” or an “investigation”—it is a grotesque charade. A revolvingdoor of selfprotection, dressed in the empty language of due process, while families like ours are left to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by predictable, preventable failures. Every day, we live with the knowledge that your socalled “investigations” were never designed to protect children—they were designed to protect yourselves. Quite frankly, anyone can check for themselves. A simple search of Niche Health and Social Care Consulting exposes a trail of controversy, repeated condemnation from bereaved families, and a string of investigations that have been challenged, dismissed, or blatantly whitewashed. And yet, despite all this, the NHS continues to hand them more cases. For Ayaan, for our family, this is not just “questionable”—it is a shameful abdication of responsibility. It is a conscious choice to protect reputations rather than children’s lives. It is a direct insult to every family who has been let down, including ours, whose child was abandoned while those meant to safeguard him preserved their image instead. As a family, we were thrown into a process that was never about investigating, learning, or protecting children—it was about shielding the organisation and covering up catastrophic failures. Every step was a performance for appearances, a carefully staged exercise to protect careers, while Ayaan’s suffering and our grief were treated as inconvenient, disposable distractions. We were explicitly warned by a consultant within this organisation that reports would be sanitised before publication, that any inconvenient truths would be reframed or buried as “historical,” and that our participation would be exploited to polish the Trust’s reputation. That warning has haunted our family every day, because it has been vindicated in every interaction, every document, every statement since. This is internal confirmation that even your own clinicians understand the corrosive, coverup culture that poisons this Trust from within. The same vicious patterns of delay, minimisation, and deflection persisted with Aroob’s care. Independent clinicians raised urgent, evidencebased concerns and even supplied an addendum intended to strengthen safeguards. Yet your responses were buried for months, ignored despite repeated chasing, and ultimately twisted into hollow, diluted assurances. This proves what our family has feared all along nothing has changed. When a child’s life hangs in the balance, this organisation still chooses selfpreservation over patient protection, leaving families like ours to witness yet another predictable failure. Our family has also endured conduct that was nothing short of intimidation. Simply requesting professional registration details for the clinicians supporting us triggered formal ceaseanddesist letters—letters designed to terrify, silence, and intimidate. The chilling effect extended far beyond our family, warning anyone who might dare stand with us. Make no mistake this was never about patient safety or proper governance. It was about control, concealment, and shielding reputations at the expense of truth. It begs the unavoidable question how seriously can this organisation claim to welcome scrutiny when the stakes are a child’s life Senior leaders have endlessly offered the language of engagement, transparency, and “listening”—but these words have been empty, hollow gestures. Every promise dissolved the moment our scrutiny intensified, leaving actions delayed, responses withheld, and meetings grudgingly scheduled only under pressure. This is not engagement—it is theatre, designed to make the public believe in principles that do not exist. For our family, it has been a relentless lesson in cynicism the Trust’s socalled transparency is selective, selfserving, and entirely reactive. It is not our questions that have eroded trust—it is your deliberate choices to protect yourselves at every turn. What makes this all the more unbearable is that, despite enduring relentless neglect, obstruction, and intimidation, our family acted in nothing but good faith. We supported this hospital publicly, raised thousands of pounds for its work, and sought only to help, even as our child’s death was mishandled. The contrast could not be starker our integrity, our honesty, and our grief—met with evasive, selfprotective, reputationfirst conduct from those at the very top. This is not mere failure it is moral bankruptcy, a leadership that prioritises career preservation over human life, and it has been laid bare for anyone willing to look. I am here to place on the record an unflinching challenge to the executives of this Trust. After a catalogue of failures, deliberate concealment, and badfaith conduct laid bare in this statement, the responsibility now falls squarely on you. You must explain—honestly and in full—why any further communication or engagement with your executive leadership could possibly continue. On what grounds do you claim that trust, accountability, or integrity exist within this organisation, when everything we have endured proves otherwise Ayaan was catastrophically failed. He lost his life not to chance, but because of preventable, glaring failures in care. On 5 March 2023, he arrived in Accident Emergency with oxygen saturations of 83 and a PEWS score of 7—clear, urgent warning signs. Your own policy demanded immediate consultant review and 15minute observations. What did your clinicians do instead Hourly checks. Hourly indifference. You ignored the signals designed to save him, and in that deliberate neglect, you ensured his death. Between 5 March and 8 March, Ayaan endured 72 hours of relentless neglect. Seventeen nursing referrals for urgent medical review were made. Seventeen times, bedside nurses raised the alarm over his worsening respiratory distress. Seventeen times, your medical team chose inaction. Seventeen missed chances to save my son. Seventeen moments when escalation to ICU could have preserved his life—ignored. Seventeen deliberate failures. Seventeen decisions that treated his life as expendable. Ayaan was a disabled boy, a child in desperate need, and your clinicians treated him as a burden—allowing him to die while withholding every available lifesaving intervention. Instead of owning up to these catastrophic failures, this Trust has spent three years orchestrating a coverup. You have whitewashed records, sanitised reports, and gaslit our family, dismissing over 500 urgent concerns we raised. Our grief, our child’s death, our anguish—treated not as tragedy demanding reflection, but as an inconvenience to be managed. Bravo. Truly exemplary leadership, Sheffield Children’s Hospital style. For three years, this Trust has defended a story that collapses under even the faintest scrutiny. Your own commissioned investigator admits, in the Niche report, that “most of the data appertaining to Ayaan’s care went on to the systems after the complaint.” While our son was alive, there were no meaningful contemporaneous records—nothing to reflect his suffering, his deterioration, or his cries for help. Only after he died—and only after we pursued a formal complaint and drew media attention—did detailed accounts magically appear, reconstructed from memory. This is not documentation. This is a deliberate coverup, executed in plain sight, while the people responsible hoped we would never know. This conduct is not merely negligent—it is a flagrant, deliberate breach of the Trust’s statutory Duty of Candour. Once Ayaan suffered serious harm and ultimately died, the law required you to provide truthful, timely, and complete information. Instead, you chose deception. You spun misleading narratives, shifted explanations whenever scrutiny increased, and calculated every word to protect reputations rather than our child’s life. This was not oversight. This was an institutional strategy to prioritise selfpreservation over saving a child, executed with cold, bureaucratic precision. This catastrophic failure is compounded by the Trust’s utter inability—or calculated refusal—to preserve vital evidence. After Ayaan died, no immediate steps were taken to secure contemporaneous clinical records or protect audit trails. Digital forensic metadata reveals that many records were created or exported over a year later, in 2024—long after Ayaan’s life had been lost. These are not records they are retroactive fabrications. Verbal warnings, critical to understanding his deterioration, are completely absent. Shockingly, some medical records were later discovered unsigned, abandoned in senior leadership offices. This is not clerical oversight—it is the collapse of clinical governance, witnessed and condoned by the very executives sitting in this room today, who bore ultimate responsibility for safeguarding our son. Memories were astonishingly precise when they shielded the Trust, yet conveniently “faded” the instant accountability for Ayaan became unavoidable. Remarkable. This selective recollection was never in service of his care—it was a deliberate strategy to protect reputations at the expense of our son’s life. Our family watched, powerless, as those entrusted with his safety manipulated truth, discarded evidence, and polished their own image while Ayaan’s suffering went unacknowledged. The narrative pushed by Niche—that Ayaan died because of a “lifelimiting condition”—has been decisively disproven by your own Immunology team. Yet they were conveniently never shown the draft report until we intervened. How perfectly convenient that the very clinicians whose accounts were essential were excluded from the Niche draft until the Trust was caught out. They confirmed, unambiguously, that Niche misinterpreted a basic research paper entirely backwards—a shocking failure that exposes the incompetence of the investigation and the lengths this organisation will go to shield itself while our child’s life is reduced to a footnote. If Niche cannot interpret a basic research paper correctly, the entire socalled investigation collapses. The only morally and professionally appropriate response would have been for Ruth Brown to recognise this catastrophic failure and immediately commission a truly Independent Patient Safety investigation. Instead, your Trust carried on as if nothing had happened, leaving Ayaan’s family to confront a pseudoreport that conceals devastating failings. This is not science. This is whitewashed, pseudoevidence, cynically weaponised to excuse neglect and obscure the truth of the suffering your clinicians inflicted on our child. Furthermore, on 10 March 2023, Ayaan was forcibly enrolled in the invasive PRESSURE study without our informed consent. Internal emails show that Trust leadership and executives were fully aware that no consent had been given. Their concern was never our son’s safety, nor legal or ethical compliance—it was protecting the hospital’s image. No lawful justification, no clinical rationale, nothing but reckless disregard for Ayaan’s life and rights. Our child was treated as a research subject first and a human being last. This was not an isolated tragedy. Two children—Yusuf Nazir and our Ayaan Haroon—died in ICU following the PRESSURE study, and in neither case were their parents informed at the time. Both deaths were systematically concealed by Trust leadership and Niche. This is not mere oversight—it is a deliberate, shocking, and systemic pattern of violating parental rights and the most basic principles of paediatric ethics. The very people entrusted to protect children instead became complicit in exposing them to preventable harm. Our family knows all too well the consequences of this callous, calculated betrayal. You handpicked Niche—your very own chosen investigator—to engineer the outcome you desired. A hospital that allowed a child to die cannot investigate its own catastrophic failings. That is not oversight that is coverup, plain and simple. That is marking your own homework while expecting families to believe in your integrity. Niche claimed paediatric expertise, yet in reality had conducted only a single paediatric investigation in 152 cases over the last decade—the case of Yusuf Nazir, which Wes Streeting publicly denounced as whitewashed. Their utter lack of relevant experience, combined with the blatant conflict of interest you orchestrated, fatally destroys any pretense of fairness or credibility in this socalled investigation. In nearly three years, Niche deigned to meet with our family only once, yet somehow found time to issue endless public statements claiming they “cared” about Ayaan and us. Those statements were lies—blatant, performative, and insulting. I explicitly instructed them not to use Ayaan’s name in the media. They did so anyway. After credible threats were made to my phone in February, Niche did not reach out even once. Make no mistake this was never about investigation. It was entirely about shielding the institution, sanitising the narrative, and gaslighting the family whose child had been failed so catastrophically. In recorded meetings, Cathy Winfield openly admitted that the Trust “owns” this report and will determine what is included. In plain English the Trust will sanitise every inconvenient truth before it even reaches our eyes. This is not a mistake, not an oversight—it is a brazen confirmation that the socalled investigation was never meant to be independent. From the very start, it was a performance designed to protect reputations, conceal failures, and gaslight Ayaan’s family. We also place on record a profoundly disturbing truth thirtyeight white individuals have investigated our concerns, and not a single Muslim investigator has ever been involved. Every single review has been filtered through a lens that cannot comprehend our culture, our faith, or our lived experience. Your own Child Death Review minutes contain overt racial profiling, falsely claiming that “English is not parents’ first language” and branding us as “refugees.” No referral was ever made to the Muslim chaplaincy. This complete erasure of cultural representation is not accidental—it is institutional racism, systemic, deliberate, and brazenly ignored. Time and again, Muslim families like ours are written out of processes designed to claim accountability while ensuring it never truly happens. The impact on our family is irreparable and will endure for the rest of our lives. My wife refuses to meet with you—she cannot bear to sit in the same room as this leadership team, led personally by Ruth Brown, who ignored her for 14 months after Ayaan’s death and then took active steps to orchestrate the coverup. The betrayal she endured is unforgivable, and every interaction with this Trust since has been a reminder that the very people entrusted with safeguarding children chose protection of themselves over the life of our son. Our daughters have endured unimaginable trauma. Aroob asks us repeatedly, trembling with fear, “Will the nurses and doctors kill me too” She is forced to exist under a system where the very clinicians who let her brother Ayaan die—Dr Fernando and Dr Flemons—still have the power to care for her. None of those responsible have faced accountability. They continue to practise, unrepentant, unchallenged, and entirely shielded by the very Trust that claims to protect children. Every day, our family lives with the cruel reality that this system prioritises its staff over the safety of our children. The culture you have cultivated at this Trust is beyond grotesque you harm patients, issue hollow, glowing apologies, congratulate the very clinicians who let them down, and send those same individuals straight back to work. In any other profession, such conduct would trigger immediate disciplinary action, possibly dismissal. Here, you shield them. And yet, you expect children like Aroob to continue placing their lives in the hands of those who failed her brother, knowing full well that your protective cover guarantees their impunity. Our daughters once dreamed of careers in healthcare—dreams that have been deliberately crushed. They witnessed police at our door, watched threats to section their father by a Trust Solicitor with no medical authority, and saw the calculated dismantling of our family’s livelihood. The message was clear this Trust will not only fail its patients, it will ruin those who challenge it. They will never work for the NHS, and that tragic, preventable reality rests squarely at the feet of this Trust and its leadership. Threats to section us and to question our fitness as parents were not safeguarding—they were calculated intimidation, blatant abuse, and a gross misuse of power. Evidence proves that psychological support for our family was deliberately withheld, pending the approval of the Trust’s solicitor, Marilyn Whittle. This was never about care. It was control. It was organisational abuse dressed up as safeguarding—a cynical, coercive strategy that targeted our family while betraying every principle of patient and parental protection. Given the sustained harm, deliberate obfuscation, and badfaith conduct, the onus now squarely falls on the executives of this Trust to explain why any further communication could possibly be safe, lawful, or meaningful. This is not a request—it is a direct, inescapable challenge to those in authority to justify how trust, accountability, or integrity could plausibly exist in an organisation that allowed Ayaan to die while shielding itself from scrutiny. These behaviours demonstrate an ongoing, systemic danger to every child treated by this Trust. We have also been forced to endure the Trust’s frankly absurd fixation on taxis. I was falsely accused of covertly recording Trust staff in a licensed taxi, as if I were conducting some clandestine MI5style operation. In reality, the vehicle contained approved CCTV installed specifically for my protection, following sustained hostility and credible threats directed at me. This was not covert surveillance. It was lawful, declared, and cynically misrepresented to entrap and discredit me. The dishonesty from senior leadership is total. Both the Chief Nurse, Yvonne Millard, and the Trust’s solicitor, Stephanie Kennedy, explicitly stated that no ultrasound or echocardiogram was performed on Ayaan on 8 March. That position was unambiguous. Yet the Niche report later introduced a new and extraordinary claim that the clinician had suddenly “regained his memory” and now asserted that an ultrasound had, in fact, been performed—but somehow forgotten. This is not credible clinical evidence. It is a shifting, implausible narrative, retrospectively manufactured to obscure the truth and shield those responsible. Medical records went missing for over a year before they were returned. Nursing charts from Ayaan’s admission in November 2022 were unavailable until February 2024. When they finally arrived, they stated his date of death as 13 March 2023, his age as six years old—though he tragically did not live to see his sixth birthday—and recorded him on an “inactive ward” when he had been on Ward 4. Yet Niche dismissed these charts as “inauthentic.” Every professional who has seen them must ask themselves has NHS science advanced to the point where someone could accurately predict a child’s death 121 days in the future This is not speculation—it is a stark illustration of the Trust’s deliberate deception withholding, then altering, and finally passing on records to obscure the truth about Ayaan’s care. Delay, obstruction, and misrepresentation have been the defining features of this entire process. It took fourteen months for the Chief Executive to “graciously” meet with us. During that time, our daughters were tirelessly raising thousands of pounds for this hospital—pouring their hearts into a place that had abandoned their brother. Behind closed doors, however, executives were not discussing learning or safety they were calculating how to manage our family and control the media narrative. For this Trust, caring for children has always come second protecting reputations has always come first. Even after Ayaan died, your Trust attempted to erase him entirely. When I asked if Aroob could plant flowers for her brother in the memorial garden, we were flatly refused—citing flimsy excuses about “renovations.” Two years later, nothing has been done. This is not oversight this is calculated indifference. It is a deliberate refusal to acknowledge the child whose life your clinicians failed, a chilling message that grief, memory, and justice are expendable when inconvenient to your reputation. We also place on record the blatant hostility directed at our family in public and charitable settings. Geoff Padmore raised internal alarms—not over logistics, but because we dared to attend the snowflake switchon as a family, fearing we might speak out to the media. You were quick to accept our donation, yet refused us the right to be present. Ayaan’s own clinicians at the Sleep House paid for a planter in his memory and sought to have his name engraved. The Trust blocked it, hiding behind the flimsy excuse that it “might upset us.” This was not protection—it was deliberate erasure, a calculated contempt for our grief and for Ayaan’s memory. Senior Muslim figures reached out directly to Ruth Brown—and were met with nothing but identical, copyandpaste replies. Not engagement. Not consideration. Not even courtesy. Genuine dialogue was never on the table. It was performative tokenism, a scripted façade designed to signal concern while actively refusing to confront the failures that destroyed our child and traumatised our family. Aroob stands as living proof that the story the Trust clung to to excuse Ayaan’s death is a lie. She lives with the exact same condition—and she is thriving. Ayaan did not die because of his diagnosis he died because your clinicians failed him at every turn, repeatedly, predictably, and fatally. Catastrophic, preventable failures in care took his life—failures that continue to haunt our family every single day. We are now being told to redirect our concerns to the PHSO—as if our family’s trauma and Ayaan’s death are suddenly someone else’s problem. Let us be clear passing us off does not erase the harm, the negligence, or the abuse of power we endured. No diversion, no polite deflection, no bureaucratic shuffle will undo the suffering inflicted on Ayaan or the lasting scars left on our family. We are escalating evidence of retrospective records, distorted science, investigator misconduct, intimidation, harassment, threats of sectioning, institutional racism, and deliberate cover up directly to the Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting. This includes the vicious witch hunt orchestrated to silence us—driven by the Trust, enabled by the ICB, and operationalised by Niche—once we refused to accept a sanitised narrative. Every failure and every deception will be laid bare. What is set out here represents only the tip of the iceberg. There is no meaningful dialogue through the ICB any longer, given their sustained harassment and attempts to silence our family. Oversight must now be exercised directly by NHS England’s Chief Executive, Sir Jim Mackey. We retain the non negotiable right to access the full report in its entirety before any publication, without interference, alteration, or sanitisation. We also place you formally on notice that multiple journalists are already engaged and prepared to act immediately upon publication of any report. Based on our detailed review of the Niche draft, we can state with absolute certainty that the final version will be whitewashed. The moment such a document is released, the evidence of that cover up will be exposed publicly, in full. Attempts to sanitise, soften, or obscure the truth will fail. We will not be silenced, managed, or erased. Little Ayaan deserved care, attention, and compassion. Instead, he was met with neglect, delayed treatment, and indifference. The very clinicians entrusted with his life withheld lifesaving interventions and treated his suffering as an inconvenience. He deserved protection he received abandonment. He deserved advocacy he received bureaucratic obstruction. In every sense, Ayaan was failed—by every system, every policy, and every person who claimed to care for him. This statement is made in full view of our MP, with no attempt at private negotiation or obfuscation. This is the unvarnished truth, fully on the public record. This meeting now places the responsibility squarely on Trust executive leadership to explain why any engagement should continue, given the catalogue of failures, concealment, and institutional misconduct documented in this statement. Finally, we place on record this most serious position we no longer trust this Trust to keep Aroob safe. We demand that Great Ormond Street Hospital or Alder Hey Children’s Hospital take full oversight of every aspect of her care. This is not a request or preference—it is a non negotiable safeguard. Should you refuse, we will escalate immediately and publicly. You will not be allowed to place a second child at risk under your negligent, selfprotective leadership. You failed Ayaan. We will not allow you to fail Aroob. Reconciliation is impossible until this Trust publicly admits its catastrophic failings in Ayaan’s care. Had the Trust taken responsibility from the outset, we would not be sat here today, forced to relive this tragedy in front of over 250 stakeholders who have reached out to support our family. Until such an admission is made, there is nothing further to discuss. We remain unwavering in our commitment to ensure the right lessons are learned. We will continue to fight for patient safety, so no other child suffers as Ayaan did. The evidence is clear retrospective documentation, deliberate omissions, and clinicians practising without accountability created avoidable danger—and this Trust remains responsible. This complaints process has become irredeemably distrustful and hostile. It is now the responsibility of Trust leadership to explain how any further engagement could possibly be justified. Our family’s right to access the full report cannot be denied or negotiated away. Oversight must bypass local obstruction and come directly through Sir Jim Mackey. By refusing to accept accountability, you ensure that your legacy is not one of learning, care, or compassion. It is a legacy of coverups, deception, and betrayal of the very children entrusted to your care. You chose to shield reputations over protect lives. The failures that led to Ayaan’s death, the ongoing obstruction, and the persistent risks to Aroob will define your leadership far beyond any report or statement. You will be remembered not for what you said, but for what you allowed to happen—and for the harm you deliberately ignored. This is the unvarnished truth, and it will follow your legacy relentlessly. Ayaan’s suffering was buried, sanitised, and written out—but it did not vanish. His cries of pain, ignored by those entrusted with his care, will echo in the corridors of Sheffield Children’s Hospital for generations. He was seen. His deterioration was observed. His agony was obvious. And yet, those responsible turned away. They watched him struggle, documented nothing in real time, and allowed him to die. That moral failure does not fade, nor can it be erased by reports, policies, or carefully curated words. And now, Ruth Brown, you invoke faith and reconciliation—language absent for nearly three years—conjured only on the eve of a report, when reputational risk appears. Let us be clear this is not remorse it is crisis management. As a family, we assure you—we will not soften our voices, we will not restrain ourselves, and we will not collude in silence. We will call out, publicly and relentlessly, the coverup you orchestrated and the harm you enabled. Any reputational damage that follows is not misfortune—it is entirely of your own making.