On 4th July this year a decision was made to close the congenital heart centre at Glenfield hospital in Leicester.
This means that children's heart surgery will no longer be carried out at Glenfield and also that the hospital would lose its ECMO unit.
The hospital has the largest ECMO unit in the country and has twenty years experience of using the unit to save the lives of children and adults.
An expert has declared that survival rates will drop if the ECMO unit is moved away from Glenfield.
When our little one was only two weeks old he was moved from a neo-natal unit in Nottingham to the specialist centre at Glenfield.
It was about a fifty minute journey for us, which doesn't sound much but when you are under such stress and have another child at home to think about the journeys are just horrendous. To have had to travel even further would have been such a strain on the family.
The expertise of the staff at Glenfield was evident from the very beginning.
Our son had to have major heart surgery when he only weighed five pounds. Because of the surgeons, doctors and nurses at Glenfield our (not so) little man is thriving and you would have no idea he'd been through such trauma.
Glenfield hospital serves a population of about five million and conducts around two hundred and thirty operations a year on children and seventy on adults.
An e-petition has been set up to save children's cardiac surgery at Glenfield hospital.
If you have a moment please add your signature. The petition is HERE.
Thank you
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