JPCH will not house pediatric heart surgeons when doors open

As the Jim Pattison Children’s Hospital (JPCH) prepares for the Sunday move-in date, there’s one service that the state-of-the-art facility won’t offer for pediatric patients.

It won’t have a pediatric cardiac surgeon.

The Pediatric Cardiology clinic at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in Edmonton will continue to handle cardiac surgery. This is on the basis of surgeons not being able to have enough practice to continue a highly skilled operation, based on population size of the area that’s served.

Dr. Ron Siemens is the inter-provincial head of pediatrics and a pediatric emergency medicine physician. Dr. Siemens said it was never the plan to have a pediatric cardiac surgeon at the JPCH, but all other standard surgeries will be handled in-house when the doors open.

“It’s that a highly skilled surgeon needs to operate on a certain number to stay highly skilled, and a population of a million people, more less, we will never reach that. If we were ten million, or fifty million, maybe. But I don’t think we’ll ever get to that point. It just doesn’t make sense for that.”

This is the specific case for cardiac surgeons, and in the past Dr. Siemens said children were doing poorly because of the population issue.

“Each surgeon wasn’t doing enough cases, so nobody was getting really good at it. In very specialized things where you need a significant amount of continued experience, you need to co-locate those types of situations.”

Outcomes vastly improved once they co-located to Edmonton, established as the Western Canadian Children’s Heart Network. The network spans over 4 million square kilometres, and serves a population of over 11 million in Western Canada. Services are regionalized at Stollery Children’s Hospital and the BC Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.

Provincial Health Minister Jim Reiter said the plan all along with the JPCH was to have specialists for cardiatric specialists, but not surgeons.

“The plan all along was not absolutely every single service is going to be provided here. We’re focusing on the great state of the art hospital we have, and the great service that our children and our families are going to get right here in Saskatchewan.”

When asked if there was a chance that the JPCH could possibly handle the service in the future, Reiter didn’t fully close the door on the possibility.

“You never say never for down the road, but certainly for right now, that was never the plan.”

-With files from CKOM’s Chris Vandenbreekel and Brady Lang