Guardian News and Media/London

Leeds General Infirmary has suspended surgery on children with congenital heart defects, a day after a high court judge ruled it could carry on performing such operations.

The hospital, which has been rocked by a long-running row over its children’s heart services, said it had temporarily stopped carrying out the operations to allow an internal review to take place.

The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS trust will now contact parents directly and children who were being treated at Leeds will now be sent to other hospitals around England.

The surprise immediate decision had been taken because of “disturbing” warnings from surgeons, said the medical director of the NHS, Bruce Keogh, who called it “a highly responsible precautionary step”.

There has been a long-standing dispute about the number of deaths at the hospital.

“There have been rumblings in the cardiac surgical community for some time that all was not well in Leeds,” Keogh told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“On Tuesday I had two phone calls which I found disturbing, both from highly respected, temperate surgeons who commenced the conversations by saying they had to speak out.”

One surgeon was concerned about the referrals process at the hospital, while the other was worried about staffing levels, he said.

Preliminary data revealed this week shows mortality in the hospital’s child congenital heart surgery unit was around twice the national average.

“I couldn’t do nothing. I was really disturbed about the timing of this. I couldn’t sit back just because the timing was inconvenient, awkward or would look suspicious, as it does,” Keogh said. The Leeds unit had been earmarked for closure by an NHS review, to concentrate children’s heart surgery in fewer bigger centres, but on Wednesday a high court judge quashed the decision to shut it down, to the jubilation of campaigners.

Stuart Andrew, Conservative MP for Pudsey, who has led a cross-party campaign to keep the unit open, said he had not received one complaint about care. “I think it is very odd indeed. On Wednesday we had jubilation in the area because we found out that the high court supported everything we said, that actually the decision to close Leeds was based on information that wasn’t used properly,” he said. “We have always been told it’s safe at Leeds. Suddenly that’s changed.”