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The new Congenital Heart Disease review: 38th update

Since the publication of this blog John Holden has left NHS England.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so I try to keep blogging regularly, in case you think we have gone away or eased up on the work of the review.   We haven’t. But there really is not a lot to report this week in terms of meetings or public notices……

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We have resumed the pattern of meetings with our three engagement groups. There is a joint meeting of all three scheduled for 9 March; in the meantime we have now met each of the groups individually since the new year, to summarise progress and describe what happens next.

The meetings have been very interactive and I would like to thank all involved for their contributions.

Although the formal consultation on standards is closed we are continuing to receive comments on the programme of work and we will continue to feedback developments through this blog.

Patients, families and their representatives

Our Patients & Public engagement and advisory group met on 14 January. Papers from that meeting can be found here .

Clinicians and their organisations

Our Provider Leaders’ and Clinicians’ groups met on 3 and 4 February respectively. We discussed the potential for closer collaboration, to help shape the future CHD service, whilst also looking at planning and developing the commissioning of these services (review objectives 3 & 4).

These meetings also enabled us to discuss what we had learned from our work with provider organisations on objectives 5 and 6:

  • Objective 5: to establish a system for the provision of information about the performance of congenital heart disease services to inform the commissioning of these services and patient choice; and
  • Objective 6: to improve antenatal and neonatal detection rates;

We discussed the alignment of the CHD review programme to the Five Year Forward View.

View the papers for the Provider Leaders’ meeting, along with the Clinicians’ Group papers.

NHS England and other partners

The following meetings for the review are scheduled over the coming weeks:

  • Our Programme Board is due to be held on the 18 February
  • A Joint Standards and Clinical Reference Group meeting is scheduled for 2 March
  • Joint Engagement & Advisory Meeting is to be held on the 9th March, bringing all our stakeholders together.

John Holden was previously Director of Policy, Partnerships and Innovation, since the publication of these blogs he has left NHS England.