Neurosurgery

Our paediatric neurosurgery service provides surgical treatment for children and young people with brain and spine disorders up to the age of 19, and above if required.

Our neurosurgery team performs over 600 surgeries each year and sees almost 4,000 outpatients, treating children across the UK and beyond. We care for children who require neurosurgery for a variety of reasons including:

• Brain tumours
• Spine tumours
• Trauma – head and spine injuries
• Hydrocephalus
• Craniofacial abnormalities
• Spasticity
• Spina bifida (open and closed)
• Spinal correction
• Vascular disorders 
• Surgical treatment of epilepsy
• Deep brain stimulation surgery for movement disorders

Our team runs outpatient clinics at Alder Hey and at the University Hospital of North Midlands in Stoke, as well as craniofacial clinics in Belfast. Clinics are also held at the Liverpool Women’s Hospital for families of babies diagnosed with abnormalities in their brain or spinal cord.

Our ‘first of a kind’ MRI scanner 

In October 2007 Alder Hey Children’s Charity received a donation of £3m from the Barclay Foundation to fund a 3-Tesla MRI scanner.

This high-resolution magnetic imaging combined with an adjacent state-of-the-art theatre featuring BrainLab image-guided navigation systems, enables scans to be carried out in the operating theatre during surgery. This provides the surgeon with highly accurate, real-time information used for navigation and updates on progress.

Alder Hey was the first dedicated paediatric setting in Europe to install a 3T scanner, and among many features allows:

• Surgeons to safely and completely remove tumours – significantly increasing survival rates in brain tumour cases
• Much more precise surgery – minimising the potential side effects of operations where millimetres matter
• Reduction in time and number of times children have to be anaesthetised and operated on
• minimising the exposure to radiation in children who need multiple scans during their care and treatment