NHS Specialised Services

Children's Congenital Cardiac Services

The NHS is reviewing how it delivers congenital heart services to children in England and Wales. This is at the request of national parent groups, NHS clinicians and their professional associations.

The aim of the review is to develop a national service that has:

Children’s heart surgery is an increasingly complex procedure that demands great technical skill and expertise from surgeons and their teams. The review was requested because there are concerns that some centres are not performing enough surgical procedures to maintain and develop their specialist skills, and because some centres do not have enough surgeons to guarantee a safe 24/7 service around the clock. There are also concerns that the NHS is too reliant on other countries to train the next generation of children’s heart surgeons.

There are currently around 30 consultant heart surgeons who operate on children spread across 11 surgical centres in England.  A likely outcome of the review is recommendations for a reduction in the number of centres in England that provide children’s heart surgery, for specialist surgical expertise to be concentrated in fewer, larger centres and for a national model of care that strengthens the delivery of non-interventional assessment and follow-up care in local hospitals.

The Safe and Sustainable review has involved:

Useful Links

Safe and Sustainable - A New Vision
for Children's Congenital Heart Services
in England: Consultation Document

Background

The Need for Change

Paediatric Cardiac Surgery Standards

Developing the Model of Care

Newsletters

Documents relating to the establishment
of the JCPCT

Governance and Assurance

Cardiac surgery steering group meeting
papers

Cardiac surgery standards working group
meeting papers

Safe and Sustainable cardiac surgery
partner event 22 October 2009

Response to the analysis of mortality
data of NHS Trusts in England providing
paediatric cardiac surgery 2000-2009

Meeting of the Joint Committee of Primary
Care Trusts (JCPCT) - 16th February
2011