In March 2020 the fetal cardiology team from Bristol Children’s Hospital will host the first echocardiography course that will take place at Engineers House, Bristol.
Over the last 4 years the fetal cardiology team has been increasingly involved in teaching and supporting education for cardiac sonographers and fetal medicine teams across the South West of England and within our clinical network.
In April 2016, University Hospital Bristol established the South Wales and South West Congenital Heart Disease Network. The networks objective is to provide equitable access to medical services regardless of geography and the provision of high quality information for patients, families and staff.
The success of the cardiac network and its positive impact was an inspiration for the creation of this course. We hope that this will be the beginning of many other educational meetings and your attendance at our course can help shape future training and educational opportunities.
We also aim to use this website as a platform for education, with information about diagnosis and management of babies with congenital heart disease and the hope is also to provide a forum that will facilitate communication with clinical teams.
Led by Dr. Patricia Caldas and supported by two sonographers, the service has seen the number of echocardiograms continuously increased during the last three years.
Dr. Sofia Gomes is a Paediatric and Fetal Cardiologist working at Hospital de São João in Porto, Portugal. She will present a lecture about diagnosis and management of babies with transposition of the great arteries.
As a result of this collaboration we are also organizing a fetal cardiology course to be held in Porto on the 22nd February 2020. The faculty will include Dr. Natalia Noronha, a fetal cardiologist from Hospital de Santa Cruz, who completed a fellowship in fetal cardiology in Bristol in 2018.
The fetal cardiology department in Porto has the scientific sponsorship and support of the Portuguese Society of Cardiology and is also advertised at the site of the Spanish Society of Cardiology.