NHS transplantation 'safe from German-style scandal'
Baku, January 11 (AZERTAC). Organ transplantation on the NHS is safe from the kind of scandal currently rocking Germany, one of the Britain’s top transplant surgeons has said.
Doctors in Germany have been accused of manipulating patients’ results to make them appear more ill than they are, enabling them to ‘jump the queue’ and qualify for a donor’s liver sooner.
Some are said to have received bonus payments for every liver they transplanted. Others are believed to have come under pressure to maximize the number of transplants to increase the prestige of their hospitals.
This has led to them manipulating their patients’ results, for example by mixing urine into blood samples to make it appear their kidneys were failing too.
At least 107 cases of manipulation are being investigated by German authorities, according to The Guardian.
Public confidence had been “massively shaken”, according to the German transplant organization, the DSO, with donations down 20 to 40 per cent.
But Chris Watson, professor of transplantation at Cambridge University, and president of the British Transplantation Society, said the donor system here was “very different” to that in Germany.
“There is no incentivisation for liver, or any other transplants, in the UK,” he said.
While numerous German liver transplant centres had to compete for donor organs, he went on, the UK’s had only seven centres, which were allotted the organs on the basis of expected demand.
When donor livers became available, they were then distributed to patients by each centre, strictly on the basis of medical need, according to strict guidelines.
The exception, he said, was in “super-urgent” cases where a patient would die within a day or two if they did not get one. In such cases, the patient would receive the first liver that became available, anywhere in the UK.
NHS Blood and Transplant last night admitted it was theoretically possible for livers from British patients to end up in German patients whose doctors had enabled them to ‘jump the queue’.
A spokesman said: “As soon as an organ becomes available in the UK, the transplant team will immediately look to identify a suitable recipient for the organ in the UK. In a very small number of cases, it is not possible to find anybody.
“In those rare instances, we offer the organ to potential recipients in other countries via the national organ allocation bodies, which includes Eurotransplant, a body responsible for several European countries, including Germany.
“It should be noted that there are reciprocal arrangements and UK patients benefit from organs donated outside the UK that cannot be used in the donor country.”
However, she noted that no livers had gone to continental Europe in the last five years. A small number had gone to Ireland.
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