Risky heart surgery at CHOP much safer than other area hospital, study says

Located a stone’s throw away from Penn’s campus, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia is one of the safest places for a baby to undergo risky heart surgery — far safer, it seems, than St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in North Philadelphia. 

Both St. Christopher’s and CHOP perform difficult heart surgery on newborn babies. However a Philadelphia Inquirer report found that at St. Christopher’s, one in four babies who underwent this surgery died, which is three times the rate seen at CHOP.

From 2009 to 2014, 29 out of 121 newborn babies — 24 percent — who underwent heart surgery at St. Christopher’s died. In that same time frame at CHOP, 67 out of 784 newborns — 8.5 percent — who underwent the surgery died.

Though CHOP is formally unaffiliated with Penn, its main building is located on the southeastern part of campus and some of its physicians serve as members of the pediatrics department at the Perelman School of Medicine.

A follow-up Inquirer report found that St. Christopher’s completed only 50-60 open heart surgeries a year that use the heart-bypass machine. On the other hand, CHOP completes nearly 10 times as many surgeries each year.

The Inquirer’s study was prompted by St. Christopher’s failure to participate in a statewide evaluation of its heart surgery program. St. Christopher’s was the only hospital, out of six participating hospitals in Pennsylvania and Delaware, to decline.

When asked about the issue, CHOP said in a statement, “From before birth through adulthood, the Cardiac Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia provides top-rated cardiac care. Our team is one of the largest and most accomplished in the world, and each member is specially trained to care for children with congenital and acquired heart conditions.”

The statement went on to praise CHOP’s surgical equipment and its esteemed cardiac surgeons who “perform more than 1,000 cardiac and thoracic operations per year, with outcomes among the best.”

In response to the Inquirer’s report, St. Christopher’s issued the following statement: “While we are making progress growing our volumes and improving our performance, we are undertaking a comprehensive review of our cardiovascular surgery program.”

When responding to the study, St Christopher’s mentioned a decrease in its mortality rate over the past four years but did not provide data for newborns alone.

In 2012, a former employee at St. Christopher’s filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the hospital. The lawsuit claimed that ten of the hospital’s heart-surgery patients died or suffered complications from April 2007 to April 2009. The suit is still pending.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.