A LEEDS campaign group fighting plans to close the city’s child heart surgery unit have been accused by the NHS in Newcastle of a “self-interested” attack.
Save Our Surgery is fighting a High Court battle to overturn plans to concentrate child heart surgery in seven specialist centres, excluding Leeds General Infirmary.
Part of the challenge is an assertion that “scoring” assessments of existing facilities were unfair and that, if done correctly, Leeds may have beaten Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital.
The group claims the fact that scoring on individual aspects of the two hospitals’ facilities – “sub-scores” – were not revealed meant the process was not fair. But yesterday, Fenella Morris QC, for the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, accused SOS of putting forward a “fundamentally flawed” comparison of the two hospitals’ relative merits.
The group’s analysis was “riddled with inaccuracies” and based on “highly selective information”, she told the judge, Mrs Justice Nicola Davies. “It amounts to little more than a self-interested re-scoring of all the criteria in the claimant’s favour on the basis of unsubstantiated hypotheticals,” she said.
“The claimant’s submissions based upon this purported analysis – that disclosure of the sub-scores would have revealed, or would have allowed Leeds to reveal, Newcastle’s inferiority – are bound to fail.”
Miss Morris said Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital, where Europe’s first infant heart transplant took place in 1987, is one of the top five centres in the world.
The Newcastle trust had not intended to get involved in the judicial review, but felt it had to when it became clear the stance that SOS was intending to take, she said.
“When it became clear that Leeds were seeking to support their challenge by making statements about the [Newcastle] trust which were inaccurate and professionally derogatory, the trust had an obligation to set the record straight and avoid a wholly inaccurate impression being given about the paediatric cardiac services being carried out by the trust and the appropriateness of the trust continuing as one of the leading centres,” she said. The challenge follows a ruling by the Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts (JCPCT) that heart units at Leeds, Leicester’s Glenfield Hospital and London’s Royal Brompton should stop surgery.
If the plan goes ahead, children who would have gone to Leeds will instead have to travel to Newcastle or Liverpool.
But Miss Morris said patients and their families would be happy to travel to get the best treatment available, particularly for operations which are usually one-offs.
“It’s hardly surprising that the position of patients and their families is that people will travel to the best place for that surgery,” the QC continued.
“For this critical incident, the surgical intervention, it’s absolutely vital that it should be as good as it possibly can be. That’s why travel is necessary and isn’t a reason for having a host of units across the country.”
Responding on behalf of SOS, Philip Havers QC said it was never Leeds’ intention to criticise the Freeman Hospital and that he regretted it if it had been interpreted that way.
“We don’t accept that what was said about Newcastle amounted to suggesting something fundamentally wrong and inferior about Newcastle,” he said.
Mr Havers added that, in the end, the case came down to whether it was right that the sub-scores were not revealed until after the decision was taken.
Recognising the importance of the case to so many different bodies and groups, the judge said she would do her best to give her decision in early March.
'COONSULTATION WAS TRANSPARENT'
SIR Neil McKay CB, Chair of the Joint Committee of Primary Care Trusts, said yesterday: "Everyone agrees that the NHS should expand access to local care and pool surgical expertise in fewer larger centres and we outlined in considerable detail our defence of the process in the High Court. "We believe the consultation was transparent, fair and lawful and that the 77,000 respondents to consultation were given detailed information needed to make an intelligent response to the consultation. "We believe that the detailed narrative report produced by the independent expert panel chaired by Professor Sir Ian Kennedy outlined far more effectively the panel’s assessment of each surgical centre including where hospitals were not meeting the standards."
