Child heart surgery units to learn fate (UK to close 40% if units)

BBC ^ | July 4, 2012 | By Nick Triggle

[Islander7]

The hospitals that perform child heart surgery are due to learn which will have to stop performing operations.

There are 10 units in England, but an official consultation has proposed up to four should cease doing surgery.

The NHS review was carried out amid fears expertise was spread too thinly, and has already concluded surgery should be concentrated on fewer sites.

Centres in Leicester, Leeds, Newcastle, Southampton, Bristol and London are under threat.

[Islander7]

"The aim is to concentrate surgery in larger, fewer centres as part of a wider network of services. It is the case now that we have mediocrity in our surgical centres rather than excellence across the board," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"None of the centres are unsafe but the system of surgery as we currently have it is not sustainable to the point where it can become a series of excellent centres throughout the country."

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Surgery at one unit - Oxford's John Radcliffe - was stopped as recently as 2010 after a spate of deaths.

But concerns about child heart surgery go back much further with questions being raised ever since the Bristol scandal in the 1990s when children having heart surgery died needlessly.

[txrefugee]

When U.S. voters see Socialist Europe’s disastrous failure, how can they be so blind as to walk off the same cliff? It boggles the mind.

[BobL]

Surgeries like this are EXPENSIVE, as are many medical procedures. As Britain continues to stumble backwards in their love of Socialism, they will have to also backtrack on their medical care.

I suspect in another decade or so, health care will be relegated to a few real hospitals for the political classs and what’s left of the wealthy and simple walk-in clinics for the rest. If they have a condition that requires overnight surgery, the patients will simply be told: “I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do”, as they already do when giving pain pills to the elderly so they get out of the way quicker.

[Crazieman]

The same kind of thinking prevalent here on FR that thinks we can somehow pull out of this situation by playing by the rules that no longer hold relevance.

[Nowhere Man]

The same kind of thinking prevalent here on FR that thinks we can somehow pull out of this situation by playing by the rules that no longer hold relevance.

Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of. We are getting to the point that we might have to turn the launch keys and go nuclear.

[Erik Latranyi]

Since many infant heart surgeries are for special needs children who require a lifetime of expensive care, this is a nice way to consolidate decision-making for cost control.