Thursday, May 30, 2019

Doctors Were Alarmed: ‘Would I Have My Children Have Surgery Here?’ - The New York Times

Tasha and Thomas Jones sat beside their 2-year-old daughter as she lay in intensive care at North Carolina Children's Hospital. Skylar had just come out of heart surgery and should recover well, her parents were told. But that night, she flatlined. Doctors and nurses swarmed around her, performing chest compressions for nearly an hour before putting the little girl on life support.

Five days later, in June 2016, the hospital's pediatric cardiologists gathered one floor below for what became a wrenching discussion. Patients with complex conditions had been dying at higher-than-expected rates in past years, some of the doctors suspected. Now, even children like Skylar, undergoing less risky surgeries, seemed to fare poorly.

The cardiologists pressed their division chief about what was happening at the hospital, part of the respected University of North Carolina medical center in Chapel Hill, while struggling to decide if they should continue to send patients to UNC for heart surgery.

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/30/us/children-heart-surgery-cardiac.html?