Pause and listen

THE remarkable support for children’s heart surgery services in Yorkshire has been dramatically demonstrated by a 500,000-name petition calling for the unit in Leeds to be retained following a nationwide review of care. There is no doubt that hospital services – and particularly those for children – stir the deepest of passions.

Nevertheless, a review of children’s heart surgery is long overdue. The inquiry into the Bristol heart surgery scandal called for a smaller number of larger units to centralise expertise more than a decade ago, and still nothing has been done to remedy this.

There has rightly been much concern about the review process, reflected again in a Commons debate led by Pudsey MP Stuart Andrew who called for this exercise to be halted.

Criticism has been levelled at a controversial scoring system which ranked services at the Leeds unit 10th out of 11 centres in the country, but it is claimed gave undue weight to some aspects of care and less to others.

Yet it is the distance patients face travelling to alternative hospitals that has been the focus of greatest debate. The review team calculates patients from Leeds, Wakefield, much of North Yorkshire and East Yorkshire would travel to Newcastle if Leeds closed, even though other units are closer for many people.

This has prompted suspicions efforts are being made to keep the North East unit open because it carries out heart transplants which, curiously, are not part of the review. The risk, if the Leeds unit closes, is that Newcastle will fail to attract enough patients and face closure in a decade’s time, leaving the North as the most ill served region in the country when it comes to cardiac care for children.

There must be change to improve the quality of heart services but it cannot come from a flawed review. It is time for Ministers, once again, to pause and listen.