The US government has announced that it will shut down a Kentucky organ donation group, citing persistent safety failures. The group, Network for Hope, is one of about 55 organ procurement organizations (OPOs) in the country that coordinate the recovery of organs from deceased donors and help match them to patients on the nation’s transplant list.

Safety Concerns

Among the allegations against Network for Hope is that in 2021, its predecessor organization pressured a local hospital to proceed with plans to withdraw life support and retrieve organs from a man despite signs that he was waking up from a drug overdose. The man survived, and his sister has thanked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for taking action against the organization.

OPOs cannot declare if someone is dead – only a doctor at the hospital treating the person can do that. Only after that declaration can a donor agency assume responsibility for the deceased, looking for potential recipients and scheduling surgeons to come in to retrieve the organs. Most donations come from people declared brain-dead. But sometimes doctors say a patient has a nonsurvivable injury, and the family decides to withdraw life support – and in certain circumstances, that also can allow for donation.

Network for Hope has stated that it complies with all federal organ policies and has implemented a new safeguard allowing anyone to call a pause in donation planning if there’s any concern the patient won’t be appropriate. Kentucky recently passed a law mandating that pause, and the federal Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network is working on new rules that also would require all the nation’s OPOs to implement it.

Original reporting: WESH Orlando — read the source article.