After months of deliberation and public campaigns on behalf of the hospital, Dutch Health minister Ernst Kuipers is set to announce that Groningen and Rotterdam will become the two locations for centralized pediatric heart surgery in the Netherlands.
“It’s absolutely wonderful,” Janneke Kruse, spokesperson for UMCG, told Dagblad van het Noorden. Kruse said that the hospital staff would officially be informed of the decision on Monday afternoon.
That means that the specialized care centers in Leiden and Utrecht will be closing over the course of the next 2.5 years, according to RTL Nieuws. Both cities are within an hour’s drive of Rotterdam.
An inquiry by the Dutch Health Authority published in December stated the closing the pediatric heart surgery capacity in Groningen would jeopardize the quality of care in the region.
Minister Kuipers then instructed the hospitals to decide among themselves which centres would need to be consolidated. But the medical centers were unable to come to a conclusion, and the health minister ultimately made the decision.
The most prevailing cause for concern for closing the center in Groningen was unplanned emergencies, such as drownings or heart defects discovered at birth, which mean travel several hours to the nearest pediatric cardiology department in a matter of life or death for patients.
The upheaval to family’s lives and careers for long-term specialist care was also deemed as more disruptive in the case of families that have to relocate outside of their home region.
A massive petition and torch-lit protest in Groningen in early 2022 made clear the levels of resistance within the local population to the abrupt announcement that the UMCG facility would be closing.
