— UNC Children's Hospital announced Monday that it will "temporarily pause" some heart surgeries on young patients following a recent report that children with complex heart conditions had been dying at higher than expected rates following surgery.

"While UNC Health Care and its Board of Directors have strong confidence in our extraordinary current pediatric heart surgery team, we believe it is vitally important that both current and future patients, our medical colleagues, key regulators and the public share this confidence," Charlie Owen, chairman of UNC Health Care's board, said in a statement.

The state Department of Health and Human Services is investigating death rates at the hospital in response to a New York Times report gave a detailed look inside the medical institution as cardiologists grappled with whether to keep sending their young patients there for surgery.

The article included discussions among doctors that were captured on secret audio recordings provided to The Times, in which the physicians talked openly about their concerns, including that some might not feel comfortable allowing their own children to have surgery at the hospital. The physicians also discussed unexpected complications with lower-risk patients.

While the doctors could not pinpoint what might be going wrong, they considered everything from inadequate resources to misgivings about the chief pediatric cardiac surgeon to whether the hospital was taking on patients it was not equipped to handle.

“It’s a nightmare right now,” Dr. Tim Hoffman, the hospital’s chief of pediatric cardiology, said in a 2016 meeting. “We are in crisis, and everyone is aware of that.”

In a later meeting, Dr. Kevin Kelly, head of the hospital at the time, told cardiologists to “do what your conscience says” when considering where to refer patients, according to one of the recordings.

But, he warned, performing fewer surgeries at UNC could hurt revenues and could cost the cardiologists their jobs. “If it reduces the volume of things,” he said, “I’ll just — we’ll just reduce the number of people that we have.”

In addition to the temporary halt in complex surgeries, UNC is creating an external advisory board to examine the pediatric heart surgery program and recommend improvements, creating a family advisory council, recruiting more physicians and care providers to the program and investing $10 million in new technology for the program.

"We will resume performance of these surgeries only after both regulators and the esteemed physicians on the advisory board agree it is appropriate," Dr. Wesley Burks, chief executive of UNC Health Care, said in a statement.

UNC Hospitals also released data from its pediatric heart surgery program from the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, showing that the program performed 100 surgeries since last July with a 97 percent survival rate.

"I want to acknowledge in the sincerest way possible that, for our team and me personally, the death of any child is one too many," Burks said. "These steps are part of a comprehensive effort to ensure UNC Health Care’s mission to serve all North Carolinians with the highest quality care is."