On Monday, a judge rejected the validity of the consultation into children’s cardiac services. That means there is more time to find answers to the questions posed by doctors and parents about the future of children’s respiratory care at the Royal Brompton hospital.
If the plan had proceeded in line with the options presented in the consultation, children with asthma and other respiratory conditions would either have seen parts of their service move to Great Ormond Street or been required to go there, or to other local hospitals, for certain procedures like bronchoscopy. This was because the Royal Brompton would no longer have an intensive care unit for children and it would be dangerous to conduct bronchoscopies without one.
I attended a meeting of parents at the hospital on Monday and there are plenty of questions to answer.
Most significantly, there was a lack of clarity about what the changes would mean and how they would affect the quality of care.
In principle, however, one thing stuck out.
That was the fact that respiratory patients are being treated as second-class citizens compared with cardiac patients.
The intention is to decide the future of cardiac care now and let respiratory services deal with the consequences later.
What must happen instead is that all patients – cardiac and respiratory – should have an equal input into decisions about how their care is provided.
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