Report: Organ transplant program flawed

Interesting but short article on UNOS from the LA TImes.

LOS ANGELES - The organization that oversees the nation's organ transplants frequently fails to find or fix problems at hospitals under its supervision, according to a newspaper investigation published Sunday.

The United Network for Organ Sharing has even failed to act when patients were dying at abnormal rates, and often has kept its findings secret when it does investigate problems, the Los Angeles Times reported.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061022/ap_on_he_me/transplant_woes

[GrandOak]

But be carefully on how much you ingest revenire____ because you may become the Omega man.

[APKhaos]

Read a solid piece on transplant centers in teh Washington Post a few weeks ago. The work they wrote on was done by an the AMA, from memory.

The main thrust of the piece was that a significan number of licensed and well known transplant centers were either:

- Not doing enough procedures to be considered current. There is a minimum number of procedures/year required to retain currency. The actual number varies quite a bit across different organs. There were a surprising number of sites that were way below the minimum.

- Not achieving the minimum success rate to demonstrate competency. Each organ has a specific minimum success rate, with succes defined as the transplanted organ retaining function with no sign of rejection [and a live patient, I guess]. A surprising number of centers were not even close to the minimum numbers for their specific organ.

One interesting aspect of the study was that the numbers for # of procedures and minimum success rate have been trending down for several years. The trend is clear. Thats got to be a major public health issue, right?

[GrandOak]

I believe it was a bust of Caesar and while I often go on COD2 to release my rage with a sniperscoped rifle quite often, I've felt more like one of the ashen faced members of the Matthias' family lately because of my anemia.

[nitramog]

does enyone no how california pacific med center san francisco rates fore liver transplants

[APKhaos]

You need to see this stuff, so I went hunting.....

The on-line version of the piece is missing the detailed charts on number of procedures and failure rates. Not sure if your centre was in that list, but this para grabbed my attention:

"Since last October, when the Los Angeles Times reported on serious violations at two California liver transplant centers, U.S. Senate finance chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) has pressed for increased monitoring and enforcement. In a letter sent last month to top health officials, Grassley questioned the government's reliance on patient complaints and hospital self-reporting to identify problems."

The full article is at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/05/AR2006100501622.html

It cites the sources, so a little more searching might turn up stats on your center. Good hunting!