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UK may ban private transplants
Source: Agencies |
August 1, 2009, Saturday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE British government said yesterday that it plans to ban private organ transplants from dead donors to allay fears that prospective recipients can buy their way to the front of the line.
A government-commissioned report recommended that organs donated within the state-run National Health Service should stay within the public health system, which provides universal care to everyone who lives in Britain. Though transplants are free, there are often long waiting lists.
Few Britons have private transplants, so in practice the new rules will stop overseas patients from coming to Britain and paying privately for a transplant.
The report by Elisabeth Buggins, former head of the Organ Donation Taskforce, was commissioned after a media storm over cases in which foreigners were given transplants from dead Britons.
There were reports last year about 50 foreign patients receiving livers from British donors at two London hospitals.
The transplants were legal because the NHS has a duty to treat anyone who is physically in Britain. But since the patients were not covered by Britain's health system, they paid a fee to the hospitals and doctors involved.
Buggins said that though the transplants were within the law, they had raised public "disquiet."
She said there was no evidence the private patients got organs more quickly than NHS patients, but conceded that "it is extremely difficult to insulate a donated organ from the taint of 'private purchase' if it is transplanted into a fee-paying patient by a surgeon who makes a financial gain, in a hospital which also makes a profit from the procedure."
Britain's donation rate is low compared with the US and many other European countries and the government has tried to encourage more people to become organ donors. The government said it had accepted the recommendations and hoped to enact the ban by October.
A government-commissioned report recommended that organs donated within the state-run National Health Service should stay within the public health system, which provides universal care to everyone who lives in Britain. Though transplants are free, there are often long waiting lists.
Few Britons have private transplants, so in practice the new rules will stop overseas patients from coming to Britain and paying privately for a transplant.
The report by Elisabeth Buggins, former head of the Organ Donation Taskforce, was commissioned after a media storm over cases in which foreigners were given transplants from dead Britons.
There were reports last year about 50 foreign patients receiving livers from British donors at two London hospitals.
The transplants were legal because the NHS has a duty to treat anyone who is physically in Britain. But since the patients were not covered by Britain's health system, they paid a fee to the hospitals and doctors involved.
Buggins said that though the transplants were within the law, they had raised public "disquiet."
She said there was no evidence the private patients got organs more quickly than NHS patients, but conceded that "it is extremely difficult to insulate a donated organ from the taint of 'private purchase' if it is transplanted into a fee-paying patient by a surgeon who makes a financial gain, in a hospital which also makes a profit from the procedure."
Britain's donation rate is low compared with the US and many other European countries and the government has tried to encourage more people to become organ donors. The government said it had accepted the recommendations and hoped to enact the ban by October.
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