Pediatric Heart Surgery

If your child needs heart surgery, you’ve come to the right place. Our Stanford Medicine Children’s Health heart surgery team is known across the globe for their ability to successfully treat children with simple and complex heart defects, even those who are considered untreatable at other hospitals.

Stanford Children’s pediatric heart surgeons can give your child the best possible outcome by drawing from their broad experience and in-depth knowledge of pediatric hearts. At Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, the core of the Stanford Medicine Children’s Health network, we perform more than twice the national average of heart surgeries on children of all ages. Our patients include fetuses, newborns, infants, children, and young adults.

We welcome you to get to know us.

Why choose Stanford Medicine Children’s Health for heart surgery

Families of heart patients choose us for their child’s heart surgery for a variety of reasons:

From 2019 through 2023, our experienced heart surgeons performed more than 3,000 pediatric heart surgeries versus the national average of 1,294. We also perform more heart transplants and ventricular assist device (VAD) implantations than most peer hospitals. These high volumes have enhanced our knowledge of various heart conditions and have deepened our expertise, empowering us to provide your child’s best chance at a well-functioning heart and a full life.

We are known for pushing the boundaries to treat complex hearts and give every child the best chance at living a full life. We reliably succeed at procedures considered radical and intimidating elsewhere, including heart surgeries for premature or low-birth-weight babies; pulmonary artery reconstruction for individuals with Williams syndrome, tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia, and major aortopulmonary collateral arteries (MAPCAs); and performing complex biventricular reconstruction in individuals of all ages to bring their single ventricle hearts to as close to normal anatomy as possible. With multiple specialized heart surgery programs, we are able to succeed when the odds are against us by taking heart surgery and innovation to the next level to give children with various stages of heart disease the best shot at having a high quality of life.

Our pediatric heart surgeons achieve impressive outcomes: Our overall non-risk-adjusted survival rate is greater than 95%, which is especially remarkable given that our heart surgery team treats some of the most high-risk and complex heart patients from around the world.

We are known to involve more than a dozen heart specialists before, during, and after complex heart surgeries to provide the best chance for your child’s challenging heart needs. Our 12 pediatric heart surgeons, 94 pediatric cardiologists, 15 pediatric anesthesiologists, and six radiologists who specialize in heart imaging work together as one team to provide the very best treatment for your child. This extraordinary ability to coordinate care among multiple specialists and subspecialists all under one roof is what makes our care so powerful, and it often adds up to results and a higher quality of life for your child in the long run.

We have a worldwide reputation for using the very latest surgical techniques and devices and making our own heart surgery discoveries to give every child the best chance at living a full life—even when a heart condition is deemed untreatable or hopeless. A recent Stanford-grown innovation is our novel PARplant surgery, our first-in-world success of combining two of our flagship surgeries—heart transplant and pulmonary artery reconstruction—to give the children who are candidates for this procedure a better chance at survival, significantly superior to those afforded by a heart-lung transplant.

Meet the Executive Director of the Betty Irene Moore Children's Heart Center

Frank Hanley, MD

“My approach is to make children feel as comfortable as possible by explaining to them that this is routine work for us. This is what we do best, so know that you will get through this and your child will be fine.”

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Baby overcomes a severe heart/lung defect with a flagship surgery

One of our Stanford Children’s PAR heart surgeons successfully performed an unifocalization procedure for a patient diagnosed with ToF and an absent pulmonary valve, giving him a new chance at life. 

Pediatric Heart Surgery Patient Stories