Achieving excellence in paediatric cardiac care in resource limited and resource plentiful settings and building successful care networks across different countries.

BACKGROUND

The delivery of paediatric cardiac care across the world occurs in settings with significant variability in available resources. Irrespective of the resources locally available, we must always strive to improve the quality of care we provide to our patients and simultaneously deliver such care in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. The development of cardiac networks is used widely to achieve these aims.

METHODS

This paper reports three talks presented during the 56th meeting of the Association for European Paediatric and Congenital Cardiology held in Dublin in April 2023.

RESULTS

The three talks describe how centres of congenital cardiac excellence can be developed in low-income countries, middle-income countries, and well-resourced environments, and also reports how centres across different countries can come together to collaborate and deliver high-quality care. It is a fact that barriers to creating effective networks may arise from competition that may exist among programmes in unregulated and especially privatised health care environments. Nevertheless, reflecting on the creation of networks has important implications because collaboration between different centres can facilitate the maintenance of sustainable programmes of paediatric and congenital cardiac care.

CONCLUSION

This article examines the delivery of paediatric and congenital cardiac care in resource limited environments, well-resourced environments, and within collaborative networks, with the hope that the lessons learned from these examples can be helpful to other institutions across the world. It is important to emphasise that irrespective of the differences in resources across different continents, the critical principles underlying provision of excellent care in different environments remain the same.