This story was first published in digitalhealth.net
Hospitals to stop providing complex heart surgery
NHS England has informed units in Leicester, Manchester and London that they must halt complex surgery on patients born with heart problems, by April 2017.
Five other hospital which provide treatments other than complex surgery have also been told they must stop providing such services.
The services being targeted are those which provide care to people born with congenital heart defects, including holes in the heart, which affect nine in every 1,000 babies.
The news comes after NHS England established a set of standards that it wanted hospitals to meet to ensure that both child and adult patients received high quality care. The requirements involved surgeons working in teams of four and seeing at least 125 patients per year to keep their skills up-to-date.
After inspection, NHS bosses have announced the names of trusts which are not meeting the standards. They have declared that surgery will stop at Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Trust, University Hospitals of Leicester
NHS Trust and the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Trust in London. Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust will be allowed to keep doing surgery despite failing to meet key standards because it has a children's heart transplant unit which would not be viable without surgery continuing. Instead the hospital will be given extra support; while performance at Bristol Children's Hospital will be monitored after the critical report last week, but it will still be able to provide complex surgery.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, the University Hospital of South Manchester, Papworth Hospital in Cambridgeshire, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and Imperial College Healthcare in London will also have to stop providing complex medical care, which includes procedures such as widening the arteries and repairing holes in the heart.
Simon Gillespie, chief executive of the British Heart Foundation, said: "It is absolutely critical that children and adults with congenital heart disease and their families receive safe and effective care, wherever they live."
Dr Jonathan Fielden, of NHS England, said: "There has been a great deal of uncertainty over the future of congenital heart disease services. We owe it to patients, families and staff to end that uncertainty and provide a clear direction."
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