Dear Secretary of State,

Paediatric Cardiac Surgery Consultation

I am writing on behalf of the Hampshire County Council to express our deep dismay at the current options out to consultation in relation to children’s cardiac surgery, and in particular Southampton Paediatric Cardiac Surgery Consultation.

This matter was brought to the attention of members at our Council meeting today. There was unanimous agreement that any proposal to close a Centre that has been judged by independent experts as providing the second highest quality service in the country is simply not acceptable.

The Southampton Cardiac Centre is included in just one of the four options subject to consultation, despite an established track record of exemplary services and support to patients and their families. The children treated at the Centre are amongst those with the greatest need for life-saving surgery. To expect parents to be prepared to take their child to another Centre that is not able to demonstrate the same quality of service and may be many hours drive away is astonishing to them.

We do accept that all our health services need to be safe and sustainable and there are some difficult lessons that need to learnt from the original Bristol Inquiry. To seek to apply these by penalising the Centres that provide the highest quality of care is counter intuitive. This also ignores the express views of parents that quality of care not distance is the priority. This point seems to have been lost in a complex options appraisal process that has processed families by some sort of postcode lottery and ignored their right to choose where the care for their child is provided.

The stated ambition of the consultation is to secure the highest quality care for these children and their families. The eminent expert that reviewed each of the Paediatric Cardiac Centres last year states that ‘mediocrity must not be our benchmark for the future’.

We concur with this statement and would suggest that mediocrity is precisely what will be achieved if the proposed reconfiguration is allowed to proceed on the basis of number of procedures performed and postcodes. Hampshire County Council is, and will remain, implacable in its opposition to such an approach: our children deserve better than this.

I am therefore asking that you call a halt to this flawed process and require those leading it to review their assessment of the options for reconfiguration to take account of the evidence of service quality produced by Professor Sir Ian Kennedy last year and the views of the families actually using these services.

Yours sincerely,


Ken Thornber,
Leader,
Hampshire County Council