The South West Surgery in Children Operational Delivery Network (ODN) was formally commissioned at the end of the 2019/20 financial year following recommendations made as part of the paediatric critical care and surgery in children review which reported in November 2019. The network aims to bring together clinicians, managers, commissioners, and children and their families/carers to work together to support improvement in children’s surgical services across the South West.
The South West Surgery in Children ODN is one of 10 networks being established across England – this map shows each of the 10 regions. We work together with our colleagues across England to support the improvement in children’s surgical services. You can learn more about Operational Delivery Networks here.
‘Surgery in Children’ refers to all types of surgical procedure that might be performed on children, from relatively straight-forward and routine procedures to more complicated and highly specialist operations that may take many hours to perform. Childrens surgery is performed by many different surgeons, from specialist childrens surgeons to surgeons in smaller hospitals who operate on both children and adults as required. Some areas of children’s surgery are relatively similar, such as the need to review children prior to surgery (pre-operative assessment), the area of hospital that a procedure might be performed in, and some staff may support all different types of surgery; however the pathways for different surgical procedures can be very different, therefore it is important to consider areas that are both cross-cutting (cover all types of surgery) and specific (only relevant to a particular procedure). The remit of the Surgery in Children Operational Delivery Network is therefore extremely broad and the core team work with our colleagues to agree priorities to focus on. The diagram below shows some of the different topics we are discussing in the network from broad areas such as capacity to specific patient conditions:
Image from NHS England
Click on the below areas to learn more about what we do as a network: