Home WORLD NEWS Patients in Kansas and Missouri are being passed over for organ transplants

Patients in Kansas and Missouri are being passed over for organ transplants

by Bioreports
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A nationwide rule implemented last year has sent increased numbers of locally donated livers elsewhere. And as we were warned would happen, area recipients are suffering and even dying as a result.

Transplants are down, patients waiting for a liver are sicker, and the costs and logistical problems associated with transporting the organs have increased. In the 16 months since the rule change in February 2020, transplants at the University of Kansas Health System dropped from 93 in the prior 16 months to 67 — a nearly 30% drop. Two additional patients on the wait list also died, as compared with the previous 16 months.

All this because the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit that administers organ procurement nationwide, decided that this and other donation-rich regions needed to prioritize patients in other regions with fewer donated organs.

This area donates more organs for transplant. So, rather than improve donation rates in other regions, particularly in major cities and on the coasts, we’ve been ordered to export more from here.

“The easy fix was to kind of just switch where the organs go, rather than actually do work on the foundation of transplants,” says Dr. Tim Schmidt, director of transplantation at University of Kansas Health System, which fought unsuccessfully in court to block the rule change. The KU health system is still in court to get access to documents that might explain what went into the rule change, and they’re being fought on that, too.

A similar rule went into effect for kidneys this spring, and KU reports a 15% decline in such transplants already.

“Our patients are just going to have to get sicker and sicker” before getting transplants, Schmidt adds — noting that one man on the liver waiting list, a coach/teacher in a Gardner, Kansas, school, is still waiting for help more than a year after The Star told his story, apparently because he’s just not sick enough. “He’s going to wait a while. The system’s definitely not going to help him.”

The new rule, which now sends more organs from here to such places in a 500-mile-plus radius as Minnesota, Chicago, Dallas and Milwaukee, has also led to more discarded organs due to transportation complications.

“All the models showed that this was going to happen,” Schmidt reports. “All the things that we’re trying to avoid in health care is exactly what transplant is going to: more costly, more expensive, complex. And we’re not even doing more transplants. We’re not saving more people.”

National transplant authorities have decided to push Organ Procurement Organizations to do better. But that should’ve been done before reallocating organs from successful organizations.

Roger Yates is a retired FBI special agent and regional law enforcement officer who needs a kidney transplant. But even as a 79-year-old double-cancer survivor, his chances of getting it certainly aren’t helped by these new rules.

“Obviously I’m biased and I think that’s not right,” he says blandly, more out of realistic resignation than bitterness. What would he say to someone making such rules? “I would say to that person, hey, jump up the (organ donor) education in other parts of the country and get them on board — so we don’t have this dichotomy of unfairness. Educate everybody else, so it becomes more fair.

“They tell me I’m still in the ballgame,” Yates says of his chances to get a kidney.

Maybe. But they shouldn’t be changing the rules on him and so many others in need of lifesaving transplants.

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