Meeting held over future of children's heart centre at Glenfield Hospital

A special meeting on the future of the children's heart centre at Glenfield Hospital was held on Thursday night.

Dr Aidan Bolger, head of the East Midlands Congenital Heart Centre, was there to spell out what the threat of closure means for the centre and for Leicester's hospitals.

He was also there to explain how managers are responding to the closure threat and how the public can become involved.

Penelope Edwards (in pictures) collapsed on her mum's bathroom floor last week. She was taken to Poole hospital, then whisked to Intensive Care in Southampton and put on a ventilator.

She continued to deteriorate, and so the children's cardiac experts at Glenfield were called in to help.

The flew their ECMO machine (extra corporeal membrane oxygenation) to Southampton, attached Penelope to it, and brought her back to Leicester.

Its the only machine of its kind in the country for children and acts as their lungs.

Penelope is being stabilised, and the good news is there is no infection in her lungs, but without ECMO she would have died.

When her mother Ann was told the unit may have to close, she said: