Marc de Leval: founder of the heart transplant unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital

bmj;378/jul15_8/o1759/FAF1faMarc de Leval, who set up the heart transplant unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in 1988, said his GP father had taught him to be self-critical. This proved to be the case when, in mid-career, he encountered a cluster of deaths after 50 successful arterial switch operations and he decided to retrain and subject his results to analysis, with the help of the statistician David Spiegelhalter.“It was wonderful to work with Marc on the cluster of failures paper and it changed my career,” said Spiegelhalter, now chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, Cambridge. “What emerged was a very early example of industrial quality control methods applied to medical performance,” he said.The conclusion of the 1994 paper, acknowledging “an indication of suboptimal performance that appears to be neutralised by retraining,” indicates de Leval’s humility and self-reflection, Spiegelhalter added.1 Looking back on that time, de Leval…
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