What do you think of this? UK news

January 4, 2009
Outrage over organs ‘sold to foreigners’
Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Editor

THE organs of 50 British National Health Service donors have been given to foreign patients who have paid about £75,000 each for private transplant operations in the past two years, freedom of information documents show.

The liver transplants took place at NHS hospitals, despite severe shortages that mean many British patients die while waiting for an organ that could save their lives.

The documents disclose that 40 patients from Greece and Cyprus received liver transplants in the UK paid for by their governments. Donated livers were also given to people from non-European Union countries including Libya, the United Arab Emirates, China and Israel.

The surgeons who carry out the transplants receive a share of the operation fee — believed to be about £20,000 — as all the work is done privately in NHS hospitals.

It comes as a record 8,000 Britons are on NHS lists waiting for transplant organs. About 260 British patients are waiting for a liver.

Last week leading transplant surgeons and patient groups called for an end to the practice. Professor Peter Friend, president of the British Transplantation Society, said it was unethical to give organs to people from abroad while British patients were dying.

“While there is a surfeit of UK residents awaiting transplant it is correct that these patients should have priority,” he said. “Were the situation such that there were organs that were not required, it would be appropriate to make them available to other nationals.

“We do not have a European organ donation system; it is a UK system and I therefore feel that . . . the system is there essentially for the benefit of residents in the UK.”

Jane Dodd, whose nine-year-old daughter Rebecca died while waiting for a liver transplant, said she was shocked and upset to hear that organs from British donors have been given to overseas patients.

Dodd, a part-time bank clerk from Wirral, who also has a 19-year-old son, Matthew, whose life was saved by a liver transplant, said: “I do feel that organs donated in this country should go to people from this country unless there isn’t a suitable recipient.

“If you are signing a donor card in this country you expect someone from this country to get the organ.”

The Healthcare Commission, a watchdog body, conducted brief inquiries last summer after being alerted to the practice at King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust in London, but decided it was not breaking any rules. It referred the matter to the Department of Health.

The documents show that another hospital, the Royal Free Hampstead NHS Trust in London, has also carried out four liver transplants on foreign patients in the past year, the most recent being in November.

Despite the criticism, King’s College hospital said last week that it would be “business as usual” and surgeons would continue to give British organs to overseas patients in private operations.

The hospital gave livers from British donors to 19 overseas patients last year.

A spokesman for King’s College hospital said: “We are continuing to treat citizens of the European Union as they have the same entitlement to treatment under the NHS as UK patients under European law.”

Under European law , patients from member states have a right to seek treatment in other European countries. Britain is not obliged to treat these patients, however, and the decision is left to individual hospital trusts.

If the trusts do decide to perform transplants on patients from elsewhere in Europe, they must give them equal access to British organs as those who live in the UK. When an organ becomes available, a recipient is selected according to the severity of his or her condition and the blood group.

Some leading transplant hospitals refuse to carry out such operations. Dr Mervyn Davies, a consultant hepatologist at St James’s University hospital in Leeds, which does not carry out private transplants on overseas patients, said: “There is a shortage of donors and we cannot cater for the whole of the EU.

“It is tragic for these patients but the system that we have cannot cope with the UK demand as it is. Extending that to the whole of the EU and beyond we consider is inappropriate.”

EU rules say patients from outside the bloc should be offered an organ only if it is not considered of a high enough standard or suitable for a patient in the UK.

Transplant surgeons argue, however, that if livers can save the lives of patients from Israel, Libya and the United Arab Emirates, they must be of a sufficiently high standard to treat a British patient.

The Department of Health has admitted there are concerns about the issue and is understood to be in talks with the European commission seeking clarification.
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