Kidney donor program to resume at UTMC
12/11/2012The University of Toledo Medical Center will resume performing live kidney transplants, which were suspended in August after a mistake resulted in a viable kidney being thrown away.
Dr. Jeffrey Gold, chancellor and executive vice president for biosciences and health affairs, gave the update today at a clinical affairs committee of the university’s board of trustees.The first live kidney transplant surgery would be scheduled within several weeks.
Dr. Gold said United Network for Organ Sharing notified the university it could reinstate the program after it was shut down on Aug. 10 following an error in which a usable kidney was thrown out during a transplant procedure at the University of Toledo Medical Center, the former Medical College of Ohio Hospital.
The hospital ceased its live kidney donor program voluntarily as it underwent reviews and reports. Surgeries for hundreds of potential donors and patients needing kidneys were put on hold. The university has continued to perform kidney transplants from cadaver donors.
"The membership and professional standards committee of UNOS had endorsed lifting out voluntary suspension of our live kidney program following extensive reviews, site visits, and extensive documentation," Dr. Gold said.
The UNOS endorsement came with no recommendations or restrictions, Dr. Gold said.
"It reaffirms the longstanding history, the legacy of quality of the transplant program. It reaffirms the dedication of the physicians and nurses and transplant staff who have worked so long and hard to make this one of the oldest and highly regarded programs of its type in the country," Dr. Gold said. "It has gotten us to focus on the overall quality and safety of health care, not only in our medical center, but across the country. Indeed, the number of opportunities to continue to improve outcomes in health care are tremendous."
Dr. Gold declined to comment on the status of the patient who was to receive her brother's kidney on Aug. 10, citing privacy laws and the family's desire for privacy. University of Toledo President Dr. Lloyd Jacobs has previously said he was confident she would receive a kidney through the chain of kidney donations pioneered by UTMC's Dr. Michael Rees and his Alliance for Paired Donation Inc.
Dr. Jacobs said he fully anticipated UNOS, which is the private, non-profit organization that manages the U.S. organ transplant system under contract with the federal government, would endorse restarting UTMC's live kidney transplant program.
"We have a very high-quality program," he said. "We have responded to an isolated incident in a tremendously positive way... This is not about getting our tickets punched or our tickets revalidated. This is about behaving in a leadership way as befits a great university."
Dr. Rees, one of two surgeons who perform kidney transplants at the medical center, removed the kidney on Aug. 10 that was accidental discarded by a nurse. He was stripped of his director’s title but remains on staff at UTMC. According to a UTMC corrective action form for one of the team members involved that day, Dr. Rees had completed the first surgery when he turned around to retrieve the donor kidney from the slush machine and discovered the grave error.
After the botched surgery, UTMC hired Dr. Marlon Levy of Fort Worth, a transplant surgeon and expert in his field, to review its living kidney donor program. The review by Dr. Levy, surgical director, transplantation, at Baylor All Saints Medical Center at Fort Worth, supplemented an investigation started by UNOS and the Ohio Department of Health on behalf of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.