Objective:

To describe the clinical course of paediatric patients undergoing surgery for congenital heart disease in UMAE of Yucatan.

Methods:

Descriptive review was performed on the records of paediatric patients undergoing surgery for congenital heart disease from 1 November 2011 to 30 November 2013.

Results:

The most frequent heart diseases were persistent ductus arteriosus (37.6%) and trans- position of the great vessels. The median intensive care stay was 3 days. Mortality was 11.76%, with septic shock (44.4%) in most cases. The most frequent complications were sepsis (5.9%), low cardiac output syndrome (4.7%), cardiac arrest, and AV block and ventricular tachycardia (2.4% each). There was a moderate positive correlation between surgical complications and survival or death.

Conclusions:

The number of surgical patients is lower compared to reference centres for cardiovascular surgery. There is a marked tendency to perform corrective and palliative surgeries in specific disease in patients with added risk or ‘bad’ cardiac anatomy that prevent full correction at the first attempt. Prospective epidemiological and clinical studies should be conducted to understand the behaviour of congenital heart diseases treated in the region. © 2016 Instituto Nacional de Cardiología Ignacio Chávez. Published by Masson Doyma México S.A. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).