Transplant patients ‘dying because of bed shortages’

TRANSPLANT patients are missing out on life saving operations because there are not enough beds to hold dying patients on life support until their organs can be harvested, a leading surgeon has claimed.

Kouroush Saeb Parsy, of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, said there was a “conflict of interest” between the need for intensive care beds and the need to give doctors sufficient time to gain consent, and set up operations.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, Mr Parsy warned that a “jumbo jet” worth of people were dying every three months who could be saved if they had access to donor organs.

But he said that getting more people to agree to become organ donors was not the answer. Instead, more re- sources were needed to give transplant teams more time to use the organs that they have. “If you run a system where your bed occupancy is full 100 per cent of the time and there isn’t any slack in the system, or if you can’t find room in any of the operating theatres, then it is going to cause problems,” he said.

“There needs to be more resources so that there is the space and flexibility for transplant teams to be able to carry out transplants.

“There will always be a conflict of interests when you have a dying patient in intensive care that you need that bed, and that bed could be used for someone else.”

There are around 4,500 transplants carried out on the NHS in Britain every year, but Mr Parsy said that 1,200 people will die on the waiting list, a figure that is likely to be the “tip of the iceberg” because many are not allowed to join the list because there was such a lack of donors.

Patients need to have a 50 per cent survival rate over five years to be placed on the donor waiting list, and those who do not make the criteria are left “facing a death sentence,” said the surgeon.

“1,200 people died waiting for transplants every year,” he said. “That is the equivalent of a jumbo crashing once every three months. We know it’s going to happen, we know those people are going to die and we know what to do about it but we are not addressing it. This is a tragic scenario.”