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Ayaan Haroon’s Family Statement I am speaking with this level of severity because for three years, our quiet requests for the truth were met with silence. Our tone today is the direct result of the Trusts conduct. This statement will be read in full. If that cannot happen, this meeting has no purpose. It is over 30 minutes long, and you are expected to listen to every word. There will be no interruptions, no excuses, and no attempts to condense or summarise. You are here to hear the unvarnished truth of what has been done to our family and to Ayaan. Anything less than full attention is a continuation of the failures, cover ups, and disregard that have brought us here. Due to the distressing nature of this statement, it will be read aloud on our behalf to ensure it is delivered fully, verbatim, and without interference. Sheffield Children’s Hospital has never existed for our family when it mattered. From the very moment Ayaan needed lifesaving care, every system, every policy, and every socalled process failed him. Leadership abandoned him—and abandoned his bereaved family. Clinicians ignored him. And yet, after years of raising concerns, after thousands of pounds raised for this hospital, after countless formal requests for accountability, your own Trust clinicians now want the doors to be formally shut on their executives. How convenient. How wonderfully efficient that your priority has always been reputation over reality, optics over obligation, and selfprotection over the life of Ayaan. Our grief and our anger have been treated as bureaucratic inconveniences, politely ignored until they became inconvenient for your own media narrative. Bravo. The Chief Executive, Ruth Brown, graciously decided it was finally convenient to meet us 14 months after Ayaan’s death. The Medical Director followed suit a whole 21 months later—truly a masterclass in including bereaved families in this complaints “process.” The ICB, when they eventually deigned to meet us, only did so after Oliver Coppard wrote twice, showing yet again no genuine willingness to engage unless someone else forced your hand. And Niche In three years, they have only managed one meeting with us. Even with our MP in the room today, the record is indisputable family involvement was never a priority—except when it suited the Trust. How thoughtful of you to treat grief as optional, attendance as conditional, and truth as negotiable. Today, Ruth Brown and Yvonne Millard are only sitting in this room because Sir Jim Mackey told them to. He had previously written to a Minister of the Crown on 20 October, making a promise he apparently forgot to follow up. This meeting was allowed to drift for months—ignored, delayed, and left to languish—until media scrutiny finally pried both him and the Trust’s executives out of their offices. Even now, your presence is reactive rather than voluntary. This report was handed to us in January 2025 an entire year has passed, yet Ruth Brown has failed to come facetoface to acknowledge the catastrophic failings in Ayaan’s care. Instead, she chose to write an apology letter—one we have not accepted, let alone read. A written apology is the tool of a coward it allows you to claim remorse without having to look into the eyes of the father whose son you failed. You didnt write that letter to comfort us you wrote it to tick a box while you hid in your office for 14 months. Why are you only sitting here today, a year later, for a meeting set for a mere 60 minutes Setting a 60minute limit on a discussion about a life you cut short is not a schedule—it is an insult. It proves that even today, you are not here to listen, but to endure us until the clock runs out. This is a stunning display of how little you truly value the suffering of Ayaan and the distress of his family. That position now forces a question that this Trust’s executive leadership must answer today on what basis do you believe communication or engagement with you should continue at all, given the catalogue of failures, concealment, and institutional conduct that cost Ayaan his life The burden of trust cannot rest with a leadership team that has repeatedly chosen selfinterest over Ayaan’s safety, that has obstructed, delayed, and denied basic accountability for over three years. This complaint was initiated only because, days after Ayaan’s death, more than one of your own clinicians contacted me. They stated clearly that his death was unexpected. They strongly advised us to speak to the media. They urged us to seek urgent legal advice from Irwin Mitchell Solicitors. And they warned—within days—that Trust executives would seek to conceal the failings in Ayaan’s care. That prediction has been borne out, despite continued efforts by those in this room to maintain the façade of competence and control. Predictable. Convenient. Tragic. What has compounded our distress is that the lack of independence in this process was not accidental—it was deliberate. In May 2023, when we formally requested an alternative investigation provider, we were issued with an ultimatum by Karen Conway of NHS England, stated explicitly in writing if we did not accept Niche, we would be excluded from the investigation entirely. This was not a freely made decision. It was coercion. This was institutional bullying disguised as policy. This ultimatum was issued despite us explaining that our concerns were informed by the experience of another bereaved family—the family of Yusuf Nazir, whose child’s death had also been investigated by Niche and later found to have been the subject of a coverup. It was issued despite there being at least 15 other accredited investigation providers available at the time. The message was clear speak up, and you are out. Accept the handpicked investigator, and you will have your voice—but only if it aligns with ours. I immediately escalated this in writing to the Trust’s executive leadership, setting out the seriousness of what was being imposed on us. No executive responded. That silence was not neutral—it was the first clear sign that a coverup was being allowed to take root. By failing to intervene, the Trusts executives accepted and enabled this ultimatum. The insistence on proceeding in this way fundamentally undermined any claim to independence from the outset and set the tone for everything that followed exclusion, defensiveness, and institutional selfprotection over truth. Our concerns about Niche were not speculative. They were grounded in evidence. Freedom of Information disclosures show that Niche has been commissioned for 152 out of 265 NHS investigations over the last ten years. Such concentration is no accident—it is reckless, complacent, and insulting. It raises profound questions not about learning, but about whose reputations are being protected. A system that repeatedly returns to the same provider—even after multiple bereaved families have exposed serious failings, misconduct, and coverups—cannot plausibly claim to offer independent scrutiny. To call this an “investigation” is almost comical it is a charade, a revolvingdoor exercise in selfprotection, dressed up as due process, while families are left to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by predictable failures. Quite frankly, anyone can verify this for themselves. A simple search of Niche Health and Social Care Consulting reveals a catalogue of controversy, repeated criticism from families, and a mounting trail of investigations that have been challenged, dismissed, or whitewashed and sanitised. Against this backdrop, the NHS’s continued, preferential use of Niche is not merely questionable—it is an indefensible abdication of responsibility. It is a conscious choice to prioritise reputation over truth, and a slap in the face to every family who has been let down including Ayaans bereaved family. As a family, we were thrust into a process that was clearly designed not to investigate, learn, or protect children, but to shield the organisation and paper over catastrophic failures. It was a performance for appearances, a stage set to protect careers, while our child’s suffering and our grief were treated as inconvenient distractions. We were also warned by a consultant within this organisation that reports would be sanitised before publication, that inconvenient findings would be conveniently reframed as historical, and that our participation would be harvested for reputational gain. That warning has haunted us because it has been borne out in every interaction, every document, and every statement since. This is confirmation from within the organisation itself that clinicians recognise the corrosive culture of coverup that dominates the Trust. The same patterns of delay, minimisation, and deflection continued with Aroob’s care. Independent clinicians raised urgent, evidencebased concerns and even provided an addendum designed to strengthen safeguards. Yet responses were delayed for months, repeatedly ignored despite chasing, and ultimately twisted into diluted assurances. This only confirms what we have long feared the Trust has not changed at all. When faced with challenge, even where a child’s life hangs in the balance, this organisation chooses protection of itself over protection of patients. We have also endured conduct that goes far beyond mere disagreement—it was intimidation, plain and simple. Requests for professional registration details of clinicians supporting us resulted in formal ceaseanddesist letters. This created a chilling effect not only for our family but for anyone who dared to advocate alongside us. This was never about patient safety or governance it was about control, silencing, and protecting reputations. It forces the stark question how genuinely open is this organisation to scrutiny when children’s lives are at stake Senior leaders have repeatedly offered the language of engagement and transparency—but words have been hollow. Too often, those assurances dissolved when scrutiny intensified, leaving actions delayed and meetings arranged only after pressure. This pattern confirms what we have long feared engagement was never principled, never genuine, and entirely reactive. Trust has been eroded not by our questioning, but by your selective, selfserving responses. What makes this particularly painful is that, despite enduring neglect, obstruction, and intimidation, we have continued to act in good faith. We supported this hospital publicly and raised thousands for its work. That stark contrast—between our integrity and the evasive, selfprotective conduct of those in positions of authority—exposes moral bankruptcy at the top of Sheffield Children’s Hospital. While you were internally plotting how to manage our narrative and exclude us from the investigation, you were happily banking the thousands of pounds our grieving daughters raised for you. You took the money of the children you traumatized to fund the very institution that failed their brother. That is not just a failure of leadership it is a moral sickness. I am here to place on record a direct challenge to the executives of this Trust. Given the catalogue of failures, concealment, and badfaith conduct set out in this statement, the burden now rests with you. You must explain why any further communication or engagement with your executive leadership should continue at all. On what basis do you assert that trust, accountability, or integrity exist to justify further engagement when your own clinicians want the doors to be shut on you Ayaan was failed. He lost his life because of catastrophic, preventable failures in his care—failures I witnessed personally, minute by minute, while your staff looked right through him. The HDU Miracle in Accident and Emergency On 5 March 2023, Ayaan arrived in Accident and Emergency with oxygen saturations of 83. Your staff clearly recognized the danger initially, because they put him in a High Dependency Unit HDU bed immediately. But then, in a stroke of clinical genius I still cannot comprehend, you decided he was stable enough to be sent to a general ward instead of the Intensive Care Unit he so obviously needed. I watched as you effectively downgraded his survival chances, moving a suffocating child to a standard ward as if the elevator ride had somehow cured him. It was a masterclass in clinical negligence recognizing a crisis, and then choosing to ignore it. The Optional Safety System Your internal policy states that a PEWS score of 7 is a red alert requiring 15minute observations and an immediate consultant review. It was truly impressive to watch your clinicians treat these lifesaving rules as mere suggestions. I sat by my son’s bed and watched as his PEWS scores climbed to 11 and 12—scores that indicate a child is in profound danger. Yet, I witnessed these scores of 11 and 12 being ignored as if they were nothing more than a room number or a lunch order. There was no consultant review. There were no 15minute mandated nursing reviews. I watched your staff carry out hourly observations while my son was struggling for every breath, despite his chart screaming for immediate intervention. Apparently, in this hospital, a PEWS score of 12 is just a number on a page, not a reason to actually help a child. You didn’t just miss the warning signs you looked at the fire alarm and decided not to pull it. The Phantom Consultants and the Optimistic Juniors What was most striking was the complete disappearance of senior leadership when the situation turned critical. I watched as consultants were called, yet they apparently had more important places to be than at the bedside of a deteriorating child. It was a masterclass in abandonment. You left Ayaan at the mercy of junior doctors who were playing a dangerous game of unwarranted optimism. I watched as they stood there, completely out of their depth, even documenting that he had improved while his scores were at a critical 8 and above. It must be a very efficient system you have—where the people with the expertise never show up, and the people left behind have no idea how to save a life The Conveyer Belt of Neglect on Ward 4 The handovers on Ward 4 were nothing short of a black hole where information went to die. I witnessed the chaotic and ineffective reality of your communication firsthand. I saw doctors walking onto the ward with no idea how sick Ayaan actually was because his lifethreatening stats were simply missing from the handover sheets. You carried forward old information on your screens for days, effectively making his worsening condition invisible. In those handovers, Ayaan’s life was treated as background noise. No one flagged him. No one prioritized him. To my MP in this room today, I want it known this wasnt just a mistake. You built a system that was supposed to protect children, but I watched as you used it to ensure my son remained invisible until it was too late to save him. The very system meant to be his lifeline became his conveyor belt of neglect. The 72hour window between 5 March and 8 March was a relentless, documented series of ignored warnings. During those three days, there were seventeen separate nursing referrals for urgent medical review. Seventeen times, the nurses at his bedside—the only people actually watching my son—sent out a distress signal about his collapsing respiratory system. And seventeen times, your medical team responded with nothing but silence and indifference. I sat there and watched as PEWS scores of 11 and 12 were completely ignored, with no consultant review and no mandated 15minute checks. These werent missed opportunities they were seventeen precise moments when an escalation to the ICU would have saved my son’s life. Instead, they were seventeen deliberate failures. It is undeniable that because Ayaan was a disabled boy, he was treated as a burden rather than a patient. Your clinicians allowed him to die by withholding every lifesaving treatment available, essentially deciding that his disability made his life expendable. You looked at seventeen chances to save him and chose none of them. And instead of acknowledging these failures, this Trust has spent three years covering up, whitewashing, sanitising, and gaslighting us, dismissing over 500 concerns we raised. You treated our grief not as a tragedy demanding reflection, but as a problem to manage. Bravo. Absolutely exemplary leadership. For three years, this Trust has peddled a narrative that collapses under scrutiny. Your own Niche report admits most of the data appertaining to Ayaan’s care went on to the systems after the complaint. While my son was fighting for his life, there were no meaningful contemporaneous records. Only after he died—and only after our formal complaint—did detailed accounts suddenly appear, written retrospectively to suit a defense. Your recordkeeping was so chaotic you even filed another patient’s medical notes inside Ayaan’s own file. This is not documentation it is a retrospective coverup in plain sight. This conduct constitutes a flagrant breach of the Trust’s statutory Duty of Candour. Once serious harm and death were known, you were legally obliged to provide truthful, timely, and complete information. Instead, you chose deception. The Niche report highlights a late and inconsistent reporting culture, revealing that your explanations only shifted when our scrutiny intensified. This was not an oversight it was a calculated institutional response designed to protect reputations over my son’s life. You didnt just fail to care for Ayaan you failed to be honest about why he died. This failure is compounded by your complete unwillingness to preserve evidence. Following Ayaan’s death, no steps were taken to secure contemporaneous records or lock audit trails. Digital metadata proves many records were only created or exported in 2024—over a year after he died. These are not medical notes they are retroactive reconstructions. The Niche report even reveals that clinical notes for an entirely different patient were found inside Ayaan’s file. Most disturbingly, some of his medical records were discovered unsigned in senior leadership offices. This is not a clerical error it is a fundamental collapse of clinical governance overseen by the very executives sitting in this room. You didnt just fail to save his life you failed to respect the truth of how he died. The Trust’s memory has been remarkably selective. Clinicians provided accounts that were precise and detailed when they served to protect the Trust, yet their memories faded the moment accountability for Ayaan became unavoidable. Remarkable. Your staff can remember a management plan from days prior, yet they cannot recall why they ignored seventeen urgent nursing referrals or why they left a child with a PEWS score of 12 without a consultant review. This isn’t a loss of memory it is a safeguarding of institutional reputation. You have used recollection as a shield to hide the truth from this family and from the law. The narrative pushed in the draft report—that Ayaan died because of a lifelimiting condition—is a scientific fabrication. This theory was definitively disproven by your own Immunology team, whom you conveniently excluded from the drafting process until we intervened. It is a scandal that the very experts whose evidence was critical were silenced until you were caught out. Your investigators didnt just make a mistake they misinterpreted a basic research paper backtofront to fit a predetermined conclusion. If Niche cannot interpret a primary research paper correctly, the entire investigation is discredited. At that moment, the only honorable course of action for Ruth Brown would have been to scrap this pseudoreport and call for a truly Independent Patient Safety Investigation. Instead, you proceeded as if nothing had happened, cynically deploying whitewashed pseudoevidence to excuse neglect. You tried to blame Ayaan’s genetics for the failures of your doctors, and in doing so, you have turned this investigation into a weapon of further harm. On 10 March 2023, Ayaan was randomized into the invasive PRESSURE study without our informed consent or knowledge. Internal emails prove your leadership knew—in realtime—that no consent had been obtained. Your priority was media optics, not the law. This was no isolated incident we now know two children died in the ICU following this study—Yusuf Nazir and my son, Ayaan. In both cases, the parents were kept in the dark while the Trust and Niche covered up the truth. This demonstrates a systemic disregard for parental rights and medical ethics. The very people entrusted with safeguarding children were, instead, complicit in exposing them to unauthorized harm. You handpicked Niche—an investigator of your choosing—to deliver the outcome you wanted. A hospital that fails a child does not get to choose its own judge that isnt independence, it’s a coverup. You are marking your own homework. Niche claimed to have paediatric expertise, yet they have conducted only one such investigation in a decade out of 152 investigations the case of Yusuf Nazir—a report Wes Streeting publicly condemned as whitewashed and sanitised. By engineering this conflict of interest and selecting an investigator with no relevant experience, you have fatally undermined this entire process. This was never a search for the truth it was a search for a defense. In nearly three years, Niche deigned to meet with us exactly once, yet they’ve found plenty of time to issue public statements claiming to “care” about our family. It is a masterclass in performative empathy. Those statements werent just misleading—they were blatant lies. I explicitly instructed them not to use Ayaan’s name in the media, a request they ignored with the same indifference they showed his clinical care. Most tellingly, when credible threats were made to my phone last February, Niche’s care vanished into total silence they made no attempt to contact us. It is clear that this was never an investigation into Ayaans death. It was a PR exercise in institutional protection, designed solely to sanitize a narrative and bury your catastrophic failures. In recorded meetings, Cathy Winfield explicitly stated the Trust “owns” this report and decides what is included. This is a candid admission that you intended to sanitise the findings before they reached us. It is a blatant confirmation that this investigation was never independent it was a controlled exercise in narrative management, designed to bury the truth under your own terms. We place on record a damning, uncomfortable truth thirtyeight white individuals investigated our concerns, yet not a single Muslim investigator was involved. Every review was filtered through a white lens, devoid of any understanding of our lived experience. Your Child Death Review minutes reek of institutional racism, peddling lazy racial profiling by falsely claiming English isnt our first language and labeling us refugees. You didnt even bother to contact the Muslim chaplaincy. This total erasure of Muslim representation is not an oversight it is evidence of a systemic, pervasive culture of racism that you deliberately ignore to avoid true accountability. The repeated erasure of Muslim families from your investigative processes demonstrates a calculated avoidance of justice. The impact on our family is permanent and devastating. My wife refuses to meet with you. She cannot bear to sit in the same room as this leadership team, headed by Ruth Brown, who personally ignored her for 14 months after our child died before pivoting to actively orchestrate this coverup. Your silence was a choice, and your subsequent actions were a betrayal. You didnt just fail to support a grieving mother you spent over a year treating her with total contempt while you built a fortress of lies to protect yourselves from the truth of Ayaan’s death. Our daughters have suffered a permanent psychological trauma. Aroob now asks us, “Will the nurses and doctors kill me too” This is the terrifying reality you have forced upon her. She is condemned to a system where the very clinicians who abandoned Ayaan—individuals like Dr. Fernando and Dr. Flemons—are still permitted to treat her. It is a disgrace that those responsible for such catastrophic neglect face no accountability. They continue to practise, unrepentant and unchallenged, while my daughter lives in fear of the people who should be her protectors. The culture you have embedded in this Trust is unmistakable and toxic you harm patients, issue hollow, glowing apologies, and then pat the very clinicians who failed them on the back. In any other profession, this level of negligence would lead to immediate dismissal and disgrace here, you shield them and send them straight back to work. It is a grotesque betrayal of public trust that children like Aroob are still expected to place their lives in the hands of people who have proven they cannot be trusted. You have built a fortress of impunity where the clinicians are protected and the patients are expendable. Our daughters once dreamed of careers in healthcare, but you have successfully extinguished those ambitions. They didn’t just lose a brother they witnessed the state being weaponized against their family. They saw the police at our door and heard the threats to have their father sectioned—vile threats made by a Trust Solicitor who possessed zero medical authority to make such a judgment. They watched as you deliberately destroyed our familys livelihood. They will never work for the NHS, and that tragic loss of potential rests squarely at the feet of this Trust and its morally bankrupt leadership. Threats of sectioning and questioning our fitness as parents were never about safeguarding—they were acts of raw intimidation, abuse, and a profound misuse of power. It is a matter of evidence that psychological support for our family was deliberately withheld until your solicitor, Marilyn Whittle, granted permission. This is the definition of organisational abuse. You weaponised the mental health system to silence a grieving father and used medical care as a bargaining chip. This was not care—it was a calculated attempt at control, masquerading as safeguarding to hide your own cowardice. Given your sustained harm and badfaith conduct, the responsibility rests with this executive team to explain why any continued communication would be safe, lawful, or meaningful. I am directly challenging those in authority justify how trust can plausibly exist when you have systematically destroyed it. Your priority is survival, not truth. Unless you can prove that engaging with an organization that weaponizes its legal department is safe, you are admitting this process is a sham. This total breakdown in relations sits squarely with you. These behaviours reflect a systemic danger to every child under your care. Furthermore, your obsession with my use of a licensed taxi is as absurd as it is malicious. You falsely accused me of covert recording—as if I were running an MI5 operation—when in reality, the vehicle used approved CCTV installed for my own protection against the very hostility you fostered. This was not surveillance it was a lawful, declared security measure. You have deliberately misrepresented these facts in a pathetic attempt to entrap and discredit a grieving father rather than addressing your own failures. The dishonesty from your leadership is absolute. Both Chief Nurse Yvonne Millard and solicitor Stephanie Kennedy explicitly stated that no Ultrasound or Echocardiogram was performed on 8 March. Yet, when the Niche report arrived, the narrative conveniently shifted a clinician suddenly regained his memory, claiming an ultrasound occurred but was never documented. This is an implausible, deceptive fabrication. You are retroactively rewriting medical history to obscure the truth. It is a shifting narrative constructed for one purpose only to hide the fact that vital diagnostic steps were missed while my son was dying. Medical records went missing for over a year, only to reappear as crude fabrications. Nursing charts from November 2022 were lost until February 2024, yet when they emerged, they miraculously predicted Ayaan’s death on 13 March 2023—121 days before it happened. They even got his age wrong, claiming he was six when he never lived to see that birthday. For Niche to dismiss these as merely inauthentic is an insult to our intelligence. This isnt a clerical error it is a blatant example of the Trust’s deception. You are withholding and altering records to distort the truth, creating a narrative that defies logic and basic science. Delay, obstruction, and misrepresentation are the hallmarks of your conduct. It took fourteen months for the Chief Executive to deign to meet us, yet while you stalled, our daughters were tirelessly raising thousands of pounds for your hospital. Internally, your executive discussions were never about learning from a childs death they were focused on managing us and manipulating the media. It is clear that caring for children is a secondary concern to you—protecting your own reputations is your only true priority. The attempt to erase Ayaan’s memory after his death is nothing short of cruel. When I asked if Aroob could plant flowers for her brother in the memorial garden, you refused, citing renovations that—two years later—have never happened. This is calculated indifference and a coldblooded refusal to acknowledge the child your clinicians failed. Your hostility extends even to charitable settings. Geoff Padmore raised internal concerns about our attendance at the snowflake switchon, not for logistics, but because he feared I might speak to the media. You were happy to take our money, but you didnt want our faces seen. Even when Ayaan’s own clinicians at the Sleep House generously offered to pay for a memorial planter, the Trust blocked his name from being engraved with the insulting, flimsy excuse that it might upset us. You dont care about our feelings you care about scrubbing Ayaans name from your halls to avoid a reminder of your own failures. Senior Muslim figures reached out directly to Ruth Brown, only to be dismissed with identical, copyandpaste replies. It is patently clear that genuine dialogue was never your intention. These werent mistakes or oversights they were calculated brushoffs. You treated respected community leaders with the same robotic indifference you showed our family, proving once again that your engagement is nothing more than a scripted performance designed to stall and silence us. Aroob stands as living, breathing proof that the narrative you constructed to excuse Ayaan’s death is a lie. She lives with the exact same condition—and she is thriving. Her health exposes the cowardice of your claims Ayaan did not die because of his diagnosis. He died because of catastrophic, preventable failures in care. Every day that Aroob grows and excels, she serves as a silent indictment of the clinicians who gave up on her brother and the leadership team that chose to protect them instead of saving him. You are now telling us to redirect our concerns to the PHSO—a transparent attempt to pretend we are not your problem anymore. Let me be clear redirecting us does not erase the harm, the negligence, or the systemic failures of this Trust. Attempts to wash your hands of accountability cannot undo the profound suffering you have inflicted on our family. You are seeking a bureaucratic exit from a moral catastrophe. We will not allow you to outsource your responsibility or hide behind another process while the damage you caused remains unaddressed and unpunished. You still have over 500 concerns to answer which you have brushed under the carpet We are escalating evidence of retrospective records, distorted science, investigator misconduct, intimidation, harassment, threats of sectioning, institutional racism, and deliberate coverup directly to the Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting. Every failure and every deception will be laid bare. What is set out here represents only the tip of the iceberg of a vicious witchhunt designed to silence us, protect the Trust, the ICB, and Niche, and erode trust in families’ voices. There is no meaningful dialogue through the ICB any longer due to their harassment. Oversight must now be exercised directly by NHS England’s Chief Executive, Sir Jim Mackey. We retain the nonnegotiable right to access the full report prior to its publication. We also place you on notice that multiple journalists are already engaged and prepared to act the moment you publish this report. Based on our review of the Niche draft, we state with absolute conviction that the final version will be a whitewashed, sanitised fraud. The moment you release such a report, the evidence of your coverup will be made public for all to see. We will not be silenced. You have mistaken our patience for weakness, but your attempts to bury the truth through a controlled investigation will only result in your failures being exposed on a national stage. Little Ayaan deserved care, attention, and compassion. Instead, he was met with systemic neglect, delayed treatment, and cold indifference. The very clinicians entrusted with his life withheld lifesaving interventions and treated his suffering as a mere inconvenience. He deserved protection he received abandonment. He deserved advocacy he received a wall of bureaucracy. In every sense, Ayaan was failed by the very people and institution meant to care for him. This wasnt just a clinical failure it was a fundamental betrayal of humanity. This statement is made in full view of our MP, with no attempt at private negotiation. This is the unvarnished truth, fully on the record. This meeting places the responsibility on Trust executive leadership to explain why engagement should continue in light of the evidence set out in this statement. We place on record this most serious position We no longer trust this Trust to keep Aroob safe. We require either Great Ormond Street Hospital or Alder Hey Children’s Hospital to oversee every aspect of her care. This is not a preference—it is a nonnegotiable safeguard. If you refuse, we will escalate this matter publicly once again. You have already failed one of our children you will not be allowed to place Aroob at risk. The responsibility for ensuring her safety now rests on your willingness to step aside and let competent, trustworthy professionals take over. Reconciliation is impossible until this Trust publicly admits its catastrophic failings in Ayaan’s care. Had you accepted accountability from the outset, we would not be here today, supported by over 250 stakeholders who have reached out in solidarity. Until that admission is made, there is nothing further to discuss. We remain committed to ensuring the right lessons are learned and will continue to advocate for patient safety so that no other child suffers as Ayaan did. The evidence is clear by allowing retrospective documentation and permitting clinicians to practice without accountability, you have created a persistent and systemic danger. You have chosen to protect your reputation over protecting lives, and we will not rest until that is addressed. This complaints process has become fundamentally distrustful and hostile. It is now for Trust leadership to explain how any further engagement could be justified. The right to receive the full report cannot be denied. Oversight must now come directly through Sir Jim Mackey. By refusing accountability, the legacy you leave is not one of learning or compassion. It is a legacy of coverups, lies, and the betrayal of the very children you were meant to protect. You chose to protect reputations over lives. The failures that killed Ayaan, the systematic obstruction, and the ongoing risks you pose to Aroob will define your leadership far longer than any sanitised statement ever could. You will be remembered for what you allowed to happen and for the harm you deliberately ignored. This is the truth, and it will follow your legacy forever. Ayaan’s suffering was buried, sanitised, and written out—but it did not disappear. His cries of pain, ignored by those we entrusted with his care, will linger in the corridors of Sheffield Children’s Hospital for generations. He was seen. His deterioration was witnessed. His pain was obvious. And yet those responsible looked the other way 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 or policies. And yet now, Ruth Brown, you speak of faith and reconciliation—language you havent used for three years—only on the eve of a report when reputational damage looms. This is not repentance it is risk management. We will not soften our voices, we will not restrain ourselves, and we will not collude in your silence. We will relentlessly call out the coverup you facilitated and the harm you enabled. Any reputational damage you suffer is not unjust it is something you have earned. Let us be perfectly clear every executive of this Trust has utterly forfeited the right to speak Ayaan’s name. After years of coverups, whitewashing, retrospective records, and deliberate attempts to erase his life from memory, any attempt to invoke Ayaan—verbally, in writing, in reports, or in media statements—will be treated as a deliberate act of exploitation and badfaith misconduct. You have shown time and again that his name and his suffering were merely tools for your selfprotection. We place you on formal notice any attempt to use his name will be met with immediate legal action. You lost the privilege of acknowledging him the moment you chose to bury the truth of his death. Ayaan is not yours to manipulate. He is not a narrative to be sanitized, a detail to be shifted, or a casualty to be repurposed for your reputational management. Your repeated coverups, evasions, and institutional obfuscations have stripped you of any entitlement to even speak his name. You are permanently barred from using it in any context—public, private, or internal. This is nonnegotiable. Any attempt to do so will be viewed as a further violation and met with an immediate response. Despite everything, we remain committed to supporting Sheffield Children’s Hospital—not just its charity, but its ability to deliver real, meaningful change that genuinely benefits children. However, we will no longer allow our family to be targeted, intimidated, or silenced as part of this Trust’s vicious witch hunt. We are now clear the only place where the full truth will be uncovered is in a court of law—where Trust executives cannot handpick the outcome, manipulate the process, or continue the coverups orchestrated through Niche. Our pursuit of justice for Ayaan will be unwavering, independent, and unmanipulated, and any attempt to interfere with this accountability will be met with immediate legal action. This total breakdown in relations sits squarely with you, Ruth Brown. We place on record this most serious position we no longer trust this Trust to keep Aroob safe. On what basis do you assert that trust, accountability, or integrity exist to justify further engagement when your own clinicians want the doors to be shut on you The onus is now entirely on this executive leadership to explain why any continued communication would be safe, lawful, or meaningful. We have set out the evidence of your failures, your concealment, and your badfaith conduct. Unless you can justify why we should continue a dialogue with an organization that weaponizes its power against grieving families, we consider this process a sham. The responsibility rests squarely with you to accept that your era of concealment is over. The era of accountability begins now.