More than 90,000 Americans are on the kidney transplant waiting list. In 2011, more than 4,700 patients on this list died because they didn’t receive a donor kidney. The statistics paint a clear picture: Donor kidneys are desperately needed to save lives. This is why another statistic is so incredibly troubling: More than 2,600 donor kidneys were thrown away last year.
The wasting of precious donor kidneys is largely attributed to the current kidney transplant rules, although a recent high-profile gaffe at the University of Toledo Ohio represents waste from inexcusable negligence. In most cases, the donor kidney is wasted because it hasn’t been matched up to a recipient in a timely fashion.
For a kidney transplant to have a shot at success, the donor and recipient must be a “match.” It can be difficult and expensive to find matches, but the national Kidney Transplantation Committee recently proposed rules that would streamline this process and lower the number of wasted donor kidneys. The new rules face an array of challenges and their implementation wouldn’t be easy, but they are an important source of hope to patients in need of a functioning kidney.
If you or a loved one has been the victim of a botched transplant, contact an experienced Michigan surgery errors attorney to discuss your legal rights to money damages.
McKeen & Associates, P.C., is a highly regarded medical malpractice law firm that helps victims of surgical mistakes throughout the U.S. Based in Detroit, it has a staff of experienced lawyers who willingly travel and use technology to represent surgery error victims throughout the nation.
Source: The New York Times, “In Discarding Of Kidneys, System Reveals Its Flaws,” Kevin Sack, Sept. 19, 2012
