Ethics in Organ Transplant

A federally funded project has begun. It wants to expand organ donation by obtaining kidneys, livers and possibly other body parts from car accident victims and other urgent-care patients. This project hopes to expand organ donation into emergency rooms across the United States.

 

The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) has given a $321,000 grant at this time, to 2 emergency departments at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center-Presbyterian Hospital and Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. Both hospitals have immediately begun to identify donors among fatality patients, preserving their organs to facilitate transplant teams who can then rush in and retrieve them. At this date, no usable organs have been obtained by either hospital.

 

"This is about helping people who have declared themselves to be donors, but die in a place where donation is currently not possible," said Clifton W. Callaway, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, who is leading the project. "It's also about helping the large number of people awaiting transplants, who could die waiting because of the shortage of organs."

 

Critics are leery of this program, as it brings a questionable form of organ procurement into an ER environment, where doctors are suspected of preying on dying patients for their organs. "There's a fine line between methods that are pioneering and methods that are predatory," said Leslie M. Whetstine, a bioethicist at Walsh University of Ohio. She further states, "This seems to me to be in the latter category, It's ghoulish."  

 

Up until now, organs have been obtained for transplants in the Untied States from patients who are 1st pronounced dead in a hospital after complete cessation of brain activity, known as brain death, is carefully determined.  Now, due to increasing numbers of people dying each year while awaiting organs for transplant. the federal government is promoting this new alternative that involve a surgeon's taking within minutes from patients whose hearts have stopped, but have not been pronounced "brain dead".

More to follow...............................