I thought I would take this opportunity to reflect on the early days of our consultation on the future of services for people with congenital heart disease.

The consultation was launched on 9 February 2017, and already we have had a lot of opportunities to talk about the proposals with many of you, answering questions and listening to views. And many people are completing the survey to share their thoughts and respond to our questions. That’s really good news.

But we know that it’s not just adults who will want to have a say in this debate, many children and young people will too – either because they are living with CHD themselves, or their relatives or friends are.

It’s important that their voices are central to this consultation, but we also know that the usual style of consultation documents puts many children and young people off.

That’s why I’m pleased to be able to launch our new, specific consultation website for children and young people, including an accessible animation setting out the changes we are proposing to make – please do share it among your networks and on social media to ensure as many voices are heard as possible.

There are a lot of other resources available at our consultation hub for adults too if you have not responded yet, or you are working with others to help them understand and respond to the proposals. They include:

• The consultation document
• A summary of the consultation document in English and translated into Gujarati, Hindi, Polish, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu and Welsh.
• An EasyRead Version of the consultation document which may be useful for people with learning disabilities, some children and people with English as a second language
• A link to the children and young people’s website

In addition we have included important reference materials like:

• A link to the standards
• A list of consultation events
• Our impact assessments

At some of our events we have been asked for certain a number of questions and for certain documents – we will be updating our Q&A shortly with answers and links.

Consultation will continue until 5 June (revised date 17 July) 2017 (with a quieter period during the run up to the local government elections in May). If you have a chance to come to one of our events, we’d love to see you and hear your views. But most of all, let me urge you to complete the survey which you can find here.