Ep 45-Bristol’s Broken Heart Unit and the Dangers of Club Culture

2025-12-19

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Send us a textA newborn’s first breaths should be a promise. For too many families in Bristol during the 1980s and 1990s, that promise was broken by a system that mistook confidence for competence. We walk through how a respected pediatric cardiac unit drifted into preventable tragedy—where prolonged surgeries, poor post-op pathways, and a “club culture” sidelined data, silenced concerns, and cost lives. Then we connect the dots to the reforms that followed: centralizing complex surgery, raising volume thresholds, validating outcomes, and demanding transparency that patients can trust.

Send us a text

A newborn’s first breaths should be a promise. For too many families in Bristol during the 1980s and 1990s, that promise was broken by a system that mistook confidence for competence. We walk through how a respected pediatric cardiac unit drifted into preventable tragedy—where prolonged surgeries, poor post-op pathways, and a “club culture” sidelined data, silenced concerns, and cost lives. Then we connect the dots to the reforms that followed: centralizing complex surgery, raising volume thresholds, validating outcomes, and demanding transparency that patients can trust.

If you care about patient safety, surgical outcomes, and how real change happens, you’ll find both caution and hope here. Subscribe, share this episode with someone who trusts medicine to get it right, and leave a review telling us: what should be public by default—surgical volumes, complication rates, or both?

Resources:

Gresham College Lecture

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1120824/

https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/hc3201.097067

https://www.bristol-inquiry.org.uk/final_report/Summary.pdf

http://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1174641/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/547035.stm

https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/10/27/mr-james-wisheart

https://www.enablelaw.com/news-and-insights/bristol-childrens-heart-scandal-20-years-on-from-the-gmc-hearings/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jul/23/jamesmeikle2

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