Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether NHS England has proposed that some congenital heart disease cases can be re-directed from the Royal Brompton Hospital to Barts Heart Centre; and how many permanent congenital cardiac surgeons Barts Heart Centre employs.

NHS England has proposed that the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust (RBH) will no longer provide level 1 congenital heart disease (CHD) services, including surgery and interventional cardiology. It will be for patients and clinicians to decide together where best patients should be referred for treatment. However, NHS England has undertaken modelling to look at where RBH patients might receive their surgical care if they attended their nearest level 1 CHD centre instead of RBH. This shows that some of the surgery currently undertaken at RBH might, in future, be undertaken at Barts Health NHS Trust.

Barts Health NHS Trust is part of a level 1 centre that is delivered by a partnership of Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), University College London Hospitals and Barts Health NHS Trust. Barts Health NHS Trust does not employ congenital cardiac surgeons. However, three of the surgeons employed by GOSH provide the service at Barts Health NHS Trust.