Cardiac Statistics

Introduction

The Royal Liverpool Children's Hospital NHS Trust provides the congenital cardiology and paediatric cardiac surgical service for the North West of England and including parts of North Wales, Shropshire, Cheshire and North Derbyshire, South Cumbria and the Isle of Man. The total population in this catchment area is over 6.6 million, making Alder Hey one of the largest paediatric cardiac surgical units in the country.

There is a very close relationship between the cardiac unit at Alder Hey and the Paediatric cardiology service in Manchester with evolving shared clinical networks. Patients from Manchester requiring cardiac surgery are referred to Alder Hey and there are regular joint cardiac clinics to facilitate this.

Adults over the age of 18 years with congenital heart disease are operated on by our surgeons at the Cardiothoracic Centre Broadgreen or Manchester Royal Infirmary.

The unit comprises:

• 2 Consultant Paediatric Cardiothoracic Surgeons
• 4 Consultant Paediatric Cardiologists
• 5 Consultant Paediatric Intensivists
• 5 Consultant Paediatric Cardiac Anaesthetists.

The unit also comprises two clinical nurse specialists who provide a key liaison role between parents and medical staff.

The cardiac unit holds regular morbidity / mortality meetings involving staff from all relevant disciplines.

The unit has developed a new approach regarding informed consent.
The policy will ensure that parents are given all necessary information in order that they can be as clear as possible on the nature and implications of a particular type of operation involving cardiac surgery. Parents will be able to meet with the cardiac surgeon and other clinical colleagues in order that their questions and concerns can be fully answered to their satisfaction.
The emphasis is placed on providing the parents with the opportunity to be fully informed about the decisions they will make on behalf of their child.

There are 4 key steps involved in the process of providing relevant and timely information to parents. Information will be provided

• at diagnosis
• at preadmission clinic
• during admission for surgery
• after surgery

Although the following data has been placed onto the Trust website we are mindful of the fact that many parents will not have access to this data through the medium of information technology. Therefore, the cardiac unit will provide a hard copy of the data to parents.

The cardiac unit and the Trust believe it is essential for our activity and outcome statistics to be freely available for external review and that there should be complete openness and transparency in this regard. This report presents the activity and the results of surgery at Alder Hey for the past 3 years. Data regarding surgery at Alder Hey for the previous 7 years has already been published in the Ashton report. We present the results for the unit as a whole and have not presented outcomes for each individual surgeon since no comparative UK data exist for individual surgeons performance. This data has been analysed independently by the head of information at the NHS Executive North West, who has validated the data and confirmed the data is robust and accurate.

We initially present our surgical data but will shortly also add our results for cardiology and interventional cardiac catheterisations to provide a complete picture of the work of our institution.

Back to the Top