PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday 04 March, 2011
Cystic Fibrosis Trust offers major support to campaign to save our children’s services
The Cystic Fibrosis Trust has spoken out in support of our campaign against a recommendation to discontinue children’s heart surgery at Royal Brompton Hospital. Speaking in response to the Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts’ ‘Safe and Sustainable’ review, Jo Osmond, director of clinical care at the charity, voiced concerns about the impact of the loss of children’s heart surgery on paediatric CF services at the Royal Brompton.
She said: “The CF Trust considers this service to be vitally important in terms of the standard of care provided, its strong research base which has both national and international recognition, and also for the development of guidelines for the care of children with CF which are used throughout the UK and referenced on many of the CF Trust documents, including the recently launched CF Clinical Care Pathway.
“The CF Trust has peer reviewed the vast majority of CF specialist services throughout the UK and therefore have an extremely good overview of what services are available and where. In terms of alternative London based CF specialist services, these are currently provided by Kings College Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital and The Royal London; all of these services are stretched, particularly in terms of inpatient facilities (mainly lack of beds), appropriate level of resource (including CF multidisciplinary staff) and the general infrastructure required to cater for the number of patients that they currently care for. It is therefore unfeasible that the 300+ patients currently cared for at RBH could be easily or readily accommodated by any of these hospitals, even if they were split proportionately. Such an undertaking would require significant investment from commissioners along with expansion of current facilities which would require the acquisition of additional space upon which to build/extend, neither of which seem to be an option in the current climate.
“This (the closure of the CF service at the Royal Brompton) will be a major blow to the CF community and could potentially result in a deterioration of the standard of care and clinical outcomes for the paediatric CF population in the London area, not only for those patients currently cared for at RBH but for other patients attending Kings’, GOSH and Royal London, if their services became further squeezed by having to take on additional patients that they are neither resourced or equipped to manage.”
The Cystic Fibrosis Trust is the UK's only national charity dedicated to all aspects of Cystic Fibrosis (CF), funding research to treat and cure CF and to ensure appropriate clinical care and support for people with Cystic Fibrosis.
Follow the latest on Royal Brompton's children's cardiac surgery services via the Facebook campaign or on Twitter @RBandH. You can register to attend one of the public consultation meetings about the future of children's congenital heart services in England. The consultation period is from 1 March to 1 July.
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