The £13 million ($25 million) inquiry, chaired by Robert Francis QC, is the biggest into healthcare and is expected to send shockwaves through the NHS.
The scandal was exposed in a 2009 report by the Healthcare Commission, and the trust has since improved its standards of care.
But Monitor, the foundation trust regulator, ruled this month that the trust was "clinically and financially unsustainable" after it was revealed it would need a subsidy of £73 million over the next five years to keep it afloat.
In a speech last November, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt highlighted Mid-Staffordshire as an exemplar of the "crisis in care". He described what had happened on some wards as "a kind of normalisation of cruelty, where the unacceptable is legitimised and the callous becomes mundane".
Colin Ovington, director of nursing at the trust, said: "We have a zero-tolerance approach to poor patient care.
"We cannot emphasise strongly enough that this incident is exceptional and apologise again to the family. We want other hospitals to learn from this incident so that we can be sure that it does not happen to any other baby."
A Staffordshire Police spokesman said police were investigating a complaint concerning the treatment of a baby boy by a member of staff.
The Independent
