Limitations
This survey has some shortcomings. Due to the decreased number of congenital heart surgery procedures in our institution for different reasons, we had to reduce the number of study participants to complete the trial. In doing so, it is possible that differences between studied groups were not detected as significant. However, as a pilot study, this trial has the potential to provide a basis for further studies.Treating physicians were able to choose a vast number of daily goals which makes it difficult to fully assess the relevance of the different daily goals. Moreover, no specific instructions (e.g., how to reach a negative fluid balance of > −500 ml) per daily goals were made because of the great variability between the treated patients. Conversely, our STANDARD protocol represents the need for individualized treatment and meets the requirements of pediatric patients.It is important to stress that in about one-fifth of medical shifts, the patients were not treated as per STANDARD protocol. This might have an impact on our results. As this was almost identical between different subgroups, data are still comparable.