Question: What work did you do on heart surgery?

Christina Pagel answered on 14 Jun 2013:

Hi Maddie!

Thanks for asking 🙂

I’ve done a few projects on this with Great Ormond Street Hospital… the major one was trying to work out the risk for each child having heart surgery in England – this is really hard because there are loads of things that can go wrong with the heart and lots of things make surgery more or less risky (for instance, being premature or very young is more risky, some operations are much harder than others etc). Doing this was really important because nationally, the NHS looks at how many children have died for each hospital to see if there’s anything they need to be worried about. But because the risks are so different, just looking at the number of deaths doesn’t really tell you what you need to know (because a hospital doing really hard surgery really well will still have more deaths than a hospital doing easier surgeries really well).

But we managed to do it and then worked with hospitals to help them look at how many deaths they see taking into account how risky the operations were. It is also this method that is being used right now to look at deaths over the whole of England (it was in the news around Easter and it is again now).

We’re just starting a new project looking at complications after heart surgery in children with 5 hospitals in England & Scotland. That’s really important because so far no one really knows how common they are or what impact they have on children and their families – and if you don’t know, and can’t track it, how do you know if you’ve got better? or worse?

Sorry for the long answer!