The Utrecht surgeon Hanna Talacua – one of the few people in the Netherlands who performs the most complicated heart operations on children – finds the decision incomprehensible. According to her, the minister wrongly thinks that the various hospitals with pediatric heart surgery deliver the same quality. “But that is not the case. Utrecht has been doing very difficult operations for years, with very few children getting complications and few children dying. No matter how good the other centers are, the numbers are different with them,” she says.
Pediatric heart surgery UMC Utrecht is not yet defeated: ‘Up the barricade!’
