A liver transplant program shuts down. People on the waiting list are starting the sue:
Three people sued a hospital on Monday, just days after the federal government found that more than 30 people died there over the past two years while waiting for liver transplants.The lawsuit alleges that hospital officials didn’t tell patients that the University of California, Irvine Medical Center hadn’t had a resident liver transplant surgeon since June 2003.
The suit also alleges that UCI staff doctors conspired to perform surgeries that were more lucrative and cutting-edge while neglecting transplant patients, even when organs became available.
The other procedures attracted “more prestige, more patients, more profit and more research funding” than transplants, according to the lawsuit.
“They rejected and turned away hundreds of offers” of livers, said Lawrence Eisenberg, an attorney representing the three plaintiffs. “UCI actually rejected donated livers and the patients languished on their list and died.”
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- The demise of a liver transplant program
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- Hydroxycut causes liver damage, and why we need to regulate supplements
- Another scandal at UC Irvine
{ 6 comments }
So what do they expect? If there is no qualified hepatic transplant surgeon on staff, do they expect someone else to perform these surgeries there? Who? And if they rejected livers that were available, so what? With no surgeon, what use is an available organ? And what would have prevented a patient from listing himself at more than one center?
Presumably a candidate for transplant has a hepatologist with whom he/she is in regular contact, and who is aware of the tissue match requirements and prospects for obtaining a timely organ transplant.
Are these people complete non-participants in their own care?
What good is a suit? Do they think that by suing that a surgeon is somehow going to become available, when they readily admit there isn’t one available? And what difference does it make that some other procedures performed at the medical center are compensated better than liver transplants? Did they believe that all surgical procedures were compensated the same? I bet hepatic transplant patients are expensive to care for, and if they are surefire money-losers, most centers wouldn’t be going out of ther way to obtain more of them. Why would they?
I see the point of the suit as punishing the hospital for trying to have its cake and eat it too, the net effect of which was delay and death for prospective transplant recipients.
The only proper conduct of the hospital would have been to fully inform the patients, and to direct them elsewhere for services relating to organ transplantation.
” I see the point of the suit as punishing the hospital for trying to have its cake and eat it too,”
How exactly? What advantage is there in not performing surgery, unless they were prepaid a blanket fee for surgeries they had no capacity to provide? They earn no fees by not doing surgeries. Where is the advantage?
Unless the hospital is operating a transplant clinic with employed physicians and is deliberately misleading patients and refusing to refer them elsewhere where they might find transplant services more readily, I can’t see the wrongdoing,
or the financial incentive.
” I see the point of the suit as punishing the hospital for trying to have its cake and eat it too,”
How exactly? What advantage is there in not performing surgery, unless they were prepaid a blanket fee for surgeries they had no capacity to provide? They earn no fees by not doing surgeries. Where is the advantage?
Unless the hospital is operating a transplant clinic with employed physicians and is deliberately misleading patients and refusing to refer them elsewhere where they might find transplant services more readily, I can’t see the wrongdoing,
or the financial incentive.
I am a recent liver transplant recipient. To not have been honest with the patients regarding the inability to perform the surgery when the time came, is reprehensible.
When my MELD numbers stayed at a low level, my hepatologist advised me that his hospital did not do live liver donor transplants, and strongly suggested that I pursue that option at a transplant center with experience doing them.
That to me, is the way a doctor/hospital should treat their patients, with respect.
“Are these people complete non-participants in their own care?“
When they are put on a waiting list, a reasonable person does not interpret that as “until you die”.
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