Newborns will die if heart unit closes says expert

Dr Mark Darowski warned of “avoidable deaths” among seriously ill newborns if they had to travel to Newcastle.

The paediatric intensivist in Leeds spoke out as councillors on a Yorkshire committee continue to press health chiefs over the controversial issue.

Earlier this year, NHS heads decided Leeds General Infirmary should be stripped of its children’s heart surgery service.

That caused outrage and in October the Government announced the decision would be independently reviewed.

Leeds campaign group Save Our Surgery (SOS) has also started legal action, with the date for a judicial review now revealed as February 11 and 12 next year.

Dr Darowski, lead clinician for the North East and West Yorkshire Paediatric Critical Care Network, said immediate treatment was especially important for babies with one particular condition.

“These babies, whose outcome is excellent with timely treatment, require time-critical transfers and increasing the journey times may result in some avoidable deaths,” he said in a report.

He told the meeting he did not think the concern had been taken into account during the review: “Risk increases with distance and that fact was completely ignored.”

Councillors asked him about the impact on the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle if parents from Yorkshire refused to travel there, going to nearer centres like Liverpool instead, so it might not reach the required number of operations which the shake-up is intended to introduce.

“In my view the whole of the review has been driven by the view that Newcastle needs to be made sustainable,” Dr Darowski said.

After the meeting, a spokesman for the Safe and Sustainable review said: “Dr Darowski’s analysis is flawed because it fails to recognise that in an emergency a child with heart disease from Yorkshire will continue to be collected by the highly specialist team based in Barnsley.

“Parents, patients and clinicians told us consistently during public consultation that quality of care, not journey times, should be the most important factor.”