THEY were out in force, signing up hundreds of people to join our fight to save children’s heart surgery in Southampton.

Armed with the Daily Echo’s Have a Heart petition, former patients of the city’s top-performing cardiac unit stood outside Southampton General Hospital collecting signatures as the public consultation was launched.

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Friends Hannah Taylor and Kelly Collett, who first met when they were receiving treatment at the threatened unit, organised the mass signing, desperate to show health bosses how valued the cardiac centre for children is.

Despite being ranked one of the best, the unit at Southampton General Hospital is under threat as health chiefs look to cut the UK’s 11 centres down to six or seven.

Southampton was featured in just one of four options, which have been put out for a four-month public consultation, finishing on July 1, before the JCPCT makes their final decision by the end of the year.

If Southampton closed, it means families would be forced to go to London or Bristol to get life-saving treatment – at units which experts say fell below the “exemplary” standards that the city boasts.

Southampton is one of only a handful of hospitals which has both children’s and adult cardiac care on the same site, and having both grown up under the treatment of the unit, Hannah and Kelly, know how important that is.

Mum-of-four Hannah, from Millbrook, was born without a pulmonary artery in her heart and needed a heart by-pass when she was just one day old.

Having defied the odds and survived that, eight weeks later she was having surgery for a second time.

Growing up she was in and out of the hospital with outpatient appointments, but it was not until she was 17, that she needed her third major surgery.

The 27-year-old said: “It wasn’t my first operation, but I couldn’t remember my earlier ones because I was just a baby, so it was a whole new experience for me and one I found petrifying.

“But because the transition between the children’s ward and the adult ward is seamless at Southampton, all on the same site, with the same friendly faces that I had grown up with, I was able to trust them.

“If I had had to go to a different hospital for my adult care it would have been so much more stressful because I would have been surrounded by strangers.

“You cannot underestimate how much of a comfort it is knowing the people who are going to operate on you and having the confidence in a team that are not strangers to you.”

Kelly, 30, from Lordshill, added: “Having both children’s and adult care on the same site is vital for a patient’s ongoing recovery.

“You make friends on the children’s ward and it is reassuring when you can all move up together and know the people who are going to be treating you.”