About the Children's Epilepsy Surgery Service (CESS)

GOSH has had a programme for surgery for treating epilepsy in children since 1992. GOSH has the facilities needed for the investigations, tests and treatment your child may need. These facilities are specifically for children and the specialists who use them have many years’ experience of managing children with epilepsy. We work closely with University College London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (UCL GOS ICH), with many of the team working in both GOSH and UCL GOS ICH. GOSH CESS team also works in collaboration with King’s Health Partners (KHP) and Young Epilepsy (YE).

YE is based on a beautiful 60 acre rural campus in the village of Lingfield, on the Surrey, Sussex and Kent borders. YE provides medical assessment, rehabilitation, care and education for children and young people with epilepsy and other neurological conditions. At YE, the Neville Childhood Epilepsy Centre provides in-patient interdisciplinary assessments and rehabilitation packages for children and young people aged 3- 19.

KHP brings together King’s College London and three successful NHS Foundation Trusts (Guy’s and St Thomas’, King’s College Hospital and South London and Maudsley). KHP also have a long-established very experienced children’s epilepsy surgery service and are the South East Thames region centre for children’s neuroscience.

These partnerships mean that we can draw on the expertise of professional staff from all of these organisations, to provide a high standard of service for children and young people, with the benefit of the latest medical research.

The Epilepsy Surgery Team is multi-disciplinary. Members of the multi-disciplinary team include neurologists, neurosurgeons, neuropsychiatrists, neuropsychologists, developmental specialists, clinical neurophysiologists, EEG physiologists, nurse specialists, nurses, neuroradiologists, social workers, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, play specialists, physiotherapists and administrative staff.

As part of the CESS network, core information regarding your child will be collected as they progress through the assessment pathway. This information will be stored on a secure database called ORION, which enables the entire CESS network from across England to collate information. Staff from other centres across the CESS network will be able to access your child’s information but will only do so for audit purposes.

Basic demographic information is collected including name, date of birth and gender. The clinical data recorded includes details of your child’s seizure history, investigations, developmental assessments and treatments. This information will be held securely on the ORION database and used by the CESS network for teaching other centres, audit purposes and monitoring the long-term outcomes after epilepsy surgery.