He tells an inquiry he believed a trust was 'panicking' and was discouraged from raising rota issues.

Brian O'Donnell told the Lampard Inquiry he had worked in child and adolescent mental health services in Essex for more than 20 years A senior clinical manager at the trust that runs mental health services in Essex says he was told 4,000 unresolved patient safety reports needed to be "gone", while a public inquiry was under way. Giving evidence to the Lampard Inquiry, Brian O'Donnell, a clinical lead at the St Aubyn Centre in Colchester, accused the trust of a "cover up" to stop him from speaking out. The inquiry was set up following the deaths of more than 2,000 mental health patients over a 24-year period. Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT) told the BBC: "All reports are taken seriously, recorded and investigated." The St Aubyn Centre, which opened in 2012, is a child and adolescent mental health unit O'Donnell told the inquiry that, at the end of 2024, he was asked to review thousands of incident reports raised by staff, some dating back to 2021. He said he was instructed by a senior member of staff, who said: "We need to get these gone."