It has been reported this week that Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has announced that plans to reform children’s heart surgery in England have been suspended.
Plan To Reform Child Heart Surgery Suspended
The plans involved ending children’s heart surgery at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, Leeds General Infirmary and the Royal Brompton Hospital in London and to concentrate on care in fewer, bigger centres.
Since the plans were announced, there has been significant opposition to their implementation.
Last year, the “Safe & Sustainable Review” was performed by the Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts. Currently, ten hospitals perform the surgery to repair the hearts of children born with congenital heart defects which is one of the most complex procedures in the NHS. The review ruled that expertise was spread too thinly. It said that surgery should be concentrated to seven specialist centres by 2014 in order to improve safety. It was proposed that those centres would be at:
- Great Ormond Street, London;
- Evelina Children’s Hospital, London;
- Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital;
- Birmingham Children’s Hospital;
- Alder Hey, Liverpool;
- The Royal Children’s Hospital, Bristol; and
- Southampton General Hospital.
There were concerns from campaigners about a loss of these vital services locally and a High Court Judge quashed the decision to stop surgery in Leeds. The Judge said that the decision was flawed and “ill judged”.
Mr Hunt ordered an independent review of the decision by the Independent Reconfiguration Panel (IRP). Following their review, Mr Hunt was reported as telling the commons:
“The IRP report also concludes that the outcome of the Safe & Sustainable review was based on a flawed analysis of the impact of incomplete proposals, and leaves too many questions about sustainability and implementation.
“This is clearly a serious criticism of the Safe & Sustainable process. I therefore accept their recommendation that the proposals cannot go ahead in their current form and am suspending the review today.”
Mr Hunt said that choosing which hospitals provided the surgery was one of the most flawed areas of the review, but added that the original argument for improving care was unchanged. There is evidence that creating fewer specialist centres saves lives and the suspension of the plans will not change the underlying principle of fewer, bigger and better.
The Chairman of the IRP, Lord Ribeiro, said that access to services was one of the main concerns of the panel.
Prime Minister, David Cameron, was reported as saying:
“We have to be frank with people that we can’t expect really technical surgery, like children’s heart operations, to be carried out at every hospital in the country.”
However, he commented that it was clear the original review had not been conducted properly and that a re-start would need to be made.
Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, said:
“When it was published, while I fully support the reduction in sites, I expressed concerns about the distribution of the seven sites, skewed towards the western half of England and leaving a large swathe of the east, from Newcastle to London, without a surgical centre.”
NHS England now has a deadline of the end of July to come up with the next step in the process. The future of children’s heart surgery will be considered alongside changes to adult heart surgery.
For the time being at least, the local units will remain and this will be welcome news to families and campaigners. However, clearly the overall strategy remains the same; to concentrate on fewer, bigger, specialist centres with the view that this will improve the quality of care and ultimately save lives.
Whilst it is never going to be a popular decision to close local units, it seems that it is going to be an inevitable part of the changes to the way in which such vital and specialist care is provided in the future.
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Danielle Young is an Associate in our specialist Medical Negligence team. Contact Danielle or another member of the team on 0800 024 1976 or via our online form and they will be happy to discuss our services with you.