1.1 Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS FT “Royal Brompton” welcomes this, its first opportunity to contribute directly to the process of deciding what should be done about reorganising Congenital Cardiac Surgery “CCS” as a result of the Safe and Sustainable “S&S” Review.
1.2 So far Royal Brompton has only been permitted to challenge the self-evident errors in the proposals through the medium of Judicial Review. In those proceedings we can challenge errors of law, fairness and rationality, but not to advance the Royal Brompton’s view of the best way to go forward. Since Royal Brompton has been a leading national centre of expertise in heart and lung disease (since the NHS was born in 1948) this exclusion seems to be extraordinary.
1.3 In this paper we will deal with the problem as follows:
Executive summary
The defective architecture of the S&S process
The flawed aspiration: how many centres do we need
The mistakes made in the assessment
The damage that will be done to clinical outcomes
The way forward
Ten axioms that should command general agreement
Annex 1
Erratum
