Friday, May 27, 2011

Person or system problem, or both?

I am going to do something really wrong, commenting without knowing all the facts. But guessing from a press report, I am betting that this story is not totally a person problem:

A Pennsylvania medical center demoted a surgeon and suspended a nurse who were involved in the transplant of a kidney from a donor who had hepatitis C, a spokeswoman said on Thursday. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has also suspended its live-donor liver program as a precaution, though no problems were found with that program, UPMC spokeswoman Jennifer Yates said in a statement. The medical center voluntarily suspended its live-donor kidney transplant program earlier this month after discovering the infected kidney and notified the United Network for Organ Sharing, a national transplant agency. The agency plans to conduct a review.

It will be interesting to follow this story as it develops. It will also be revealing to see if UPMC shares the results of what they learn more broadly with the transplantation community.

In the meantime, will this have an impact on the hospital's ad campaigns?

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