Following the results of a harrowing investigation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced July 20 that it has begun a comprehensive reform aimed at ending the practice of procuring organs while donors still show signs of life.
An investigation ordered by the HHS’s Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) has found that a federally funded organ procurement organization (OPO) was related to a concerning pattern: namely, “that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a press release.
He called this discovery “horrifying.”
The OPO under investigation is a federally funded organization that serves the state of Kentucky as well as parts of Ohio and West Virginia. The release did not state the official name of the OPO.
The findings came to light after the HRSA ordered the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) to reopen a case that the Biden administration had closed. The case involved the OPO’s actions that caused “potentially preventable harm to a neurologically injured patient,” according to the release.
Reopening this case led the HRSA to examine 351 cases where organ donation was “authorized, but ultimately not completed,” according to the release. Of these, 103 cases (29.3%) showed “concerning features, including 73 patients with neurological signs incompatible with organ donation.”
“At least 28 patients may not have been deceased at the time organ procurement was initiated—raising serious ethical and legal questions,” the release said.
The investigation showed myriad reasons for these failures, including “poor neurologic assessments, lack of coordination with medical teams, questionable consent practices, and misclassification of causes of death, particularly in overdose cases,” according to the release.
In the release’s headline, the HHS described the investigation’s findings as a “systemic disregard for [the] sanctity of life in [the] organ transplant system.”
The HRSA has mandated both “system-level changes to safeguard potential organ donors nationally” and “strict corrective actions for the OPO” specifically, the release said.
The HHS is not the only part of the federal government taking interest in ethical issues around organ donation. The House of Representatives is holding a subcommittee meeting July 22 on “organ donation safety lapses and how procurement and transplant organizations intend to improve the system, to regain the trust of donors and their families,” according to CNN.
As of 2022, approximately 170 million Americans have registered as organ donors, according to the HRSA.
>> Catholic ethicist decries lax ‘brain death’ standards used by organ harvesting industry <<
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Author: Felix Miller
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