Anger as NHS England plans to close child heart disease units

Mr Adler said the decision could not in any way be in the best interests of patients with congenital heart disease and their families.

“I trust it will therefore come as no surprise when I say that “I can not agree that your decision to “cease commissioning” children’s heart surgery in the East Midlands is in any way “in the best interests of patients with congenital heart disease and their families”.

However Brompton boss Robert Craig said removing the service from a centre which carried out more congenital heart disease procedures previous year than any other was illogical.

“A lot of us go to Manchester Royal, but it’s not just the idea of the inconvenience”.

The standards included increasing the number of operations and moving all the children’s services onto one site by 2019. “Many people have worked extremely hard to ensure Leeds retains this work, and I want to pay tribute to them all for their commitment and stalwart support for the campaign to keep a full range of CHD services in the city”.

“All that money spent on the hospitals cardiology and that’s just going to disappear”.

In a series of staff briefings he said that the trust ‘will not sit by while they (NHS England) destroy our fabulous service’.

Norfolk & Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust will undergo monitoring towards progress on standards. The work UHL (the hospitals trust) has been doing has been exactly in line with what the NHS required.

Now a year ago NHS England published new commissioning standards for CHD services following extensive consultation with patients and their families, clinicians and other experts.

The changes are due to be brought in from April next year.

Up to nine in every 1,000 babies in the United Kingdom are born with heart disease and treatment for the condition is clustered in a small number of specialist centres across the country.

Non-executive director Andrew Johnson said the trust should fight the decision “any way it can”.

In a jargon-filled announcement that was embargoed until 12.01am today, NHS England said it was “concerned as to the level of occasional and isolated practice” and said it would work with Lancashire Cardiac Centre to transfer services elsewhere.

Our priority will be to work closely with colleagues in both NHS England and Liverpool to make the transition as safe and smooth as possible for our patients and their families.

In 2012 the Children’s Heart Surgery Fund at Leeds General Infirmary (LGI) instructed lawyers to lodge a judicial review into the decision taken earlier in the year to stop surgery at the hospital, following a three-year nationwide assessment of services as part of the Safe and Sustainable Review.