Children's Congenital Heart Services

The NHS has launched a major four month public consultation on the way children's congenital heart services should be provided in the future.

Specifically, this is consulting on the following areas:

• Standards of care: proposed national quality standards of care to be applied consistently across the country
• Congenital heart networks: development of networks to coordinate care and ensure more local provision (e.g. assessment, ongoing care)
• Options for fewer surgical centres: to improve outcomes for children's heart surgery in the future
• Better Monitoring: improvements for analysis and reporting of mortality and morbidity data

The public consultation runs until 1 July 2011 and anyone with an interest in children's congenital heart services is urged to take part and have their say on these vital services. Full details of the proposals and how to feed in your views is available on the National Specialised Services website.