– UCSF Medical Center has voluntarily suspended its living donor program for kidney transplants.
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Dr. Steven Katznelson, medical director of California Pacific Medical Center’s kidney transplant program in San Francisco, said the death of the donor was a “nightmare scenario”.
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“The safety and well-being of our patients is our top priority, and every effort is being made to understand what happened”, said the UCSF in a prepared statement announcing the program’s suspension. The patients who receive a kidney from living donors have better chances of positive outcomes as compared to those who receive it from deceased donors. Hospital and regulatory officials are still investigating the cause of death, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday (http://sfg.ly/1Mo23lW ). According to the medical center, the risk of a donor death after surgery is approximately three deaths in every 10,000 procedures, about a 0.03 percent. According to medical protocols, when such an event occurs, it is customary for the transplant center to cease activity in the case of living donor transplants. UCSF officials have made it clear that they will not be discussing the case any further. UCSF carries out in the region of 350 kidney transplants each year, of which around 150 involve living donors offer one of their kidneys to a patient in dire need. In total, approximately one in every 10,000 live donors loses their life during or after the procedure.
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After UCSF reported the death, the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network recommended the hospital suspend its program during the investigation, said Joel Newman, spokesman for the organization. He said neither he nor his donor, an assistant principal at his high school alma mater, are discouraged. For those who don’t know: the Organ Procurement & Transplant Network is the parent body of the United Network for Organ Sharing; it performs the job overseeing transplantation nationwide. Kaiser has never resumed its program and pays for pre-transplant care and surgery for its patients at other hospitals.
UCSF will not be conducting any transplant surgery on donors during the ongoing investigation, but will continue to transplant kidneys from both deceased and living donors into the recipients.
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The donor had provided a kidney to a recipient at University of California San Francisco Medical center in October.
