Understanding long-term effects of heart surgery in children

Using National Congenital Heart Diseases Audit data to explore the impact of non-medical risk factors on late post-operative outcomes for children with complex congenital heart defects

Today, many more children born in the UK with complex heart defects have surgery, survive and get to go home than would have done decades ago. But little is known about what happens to these children as they grow up – about their long-term health, the need for additional surgeries and their overall survival. Dr Katherine Brown and her team will use the routinely collected National Congenital Heart Diseases Audit (NCHDA) data to work out how many children with more complicated heart defects survive until primary and secondary school ages. They will also look at the proportion of children who have additional operations that were not planned as part of their expected treatment during childhood. Using this information, they will be able to tell whether children who come from a less affluent background or from ethnic minority communities have different outcomes after surgery than others. It will also show whether getting a defect diagnosed before birth, or whether being treated at a hospital that cares for larger numbers of children with heart defects, improves the outcome for these children. The information generated will be of value to many people; from parents of children born with CHDs who make decisions for their child to hospitals who need to organise their services to provide the best treatment for patients.