Review confirms heart patients will not travel

From: Sharon Cheng, Director, Children’s Heart Surgery Fund.

It comes as no surprise that the High Court has ruled the consultation into the Children’s Heart Surgery Review unlawful, based upon a scoring system and a flawed process that has been contested by 600,000 patients and parents in the Yorkshire and Humber region (Yorksh ire Post, November 13).

Before the review took its first public steps decisions had been taken that left the Leeds Heart Unit in just one of the four options put out to consultation.

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Yet the Leeds centre is both Safe (the review’s finding not ours) and Sustainable (having 14 million living within two hours of the unit).

Yorkshire and the Humber’s medical experts, parents, patients and campaigners regard this as perverse and unjust.

Assumptions were made some time ago that people would travel to the heart unit in Newcastle, if Leeds closed, have now been discredited which made the North East centre a viable option as it reached the required 400 operations.

Recent research, though, clearly shows this will not be the case as people across the region have said they would choose to travel to other northern centres with better transport links, calling the viability of Newcastle into question. People across the north of England have come together and expressed their disquiet through a petition that has received well over 600,000 signatures; the single largest mass expression of public anger at a health decision in living memory.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that reasonable steps are now being taken to safeguard the future of children’s heart surgery across the country.