Wednesday, 23 October 2013
12:30-1:30 pm
Jordan Conference Center Auditorium
University of Virginia School of
Medicine
______________
A John F. Anderson Memorial Lecture
Who Gets Organs For Transplant?
Medical, Legal, and Ethical Views
Occasioned
by the Sarah Murnaghan Case
Kenneth Brayman MD PhD, Division of
Transplant Surgery,
Department of Surgery, School of
Medicine,UVA
Richard J. Bonnie LLB, School of Law,
UVA
James F. Childress PhD, Department of
Religious Studies and
Institute for Practical Ethics and
Public Life, UVA
Allocating organs for
transplantation is a challenge across the world—the list of eligible transplant
candidates gets longer and longer while the supply of suitable organs remains
relatively fixed. With such unequal supply and demand, not everyone who
requires a transplant for end-stage organ disease can or will receive this
life-saving or life-improving treatment, and hard choices about candidate and
donor suitability and priority are common. As a result, organ trafficking is
brisk, even if illegal, in some parts of the world. In the U.S., organ
distribution is highly regulated and overseen by UNOS, a private organization
under contract with the Department of Health and Human Services.
Questions about
transplant candidate suitability and priority made headlines earlier this year,
when 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan’s parents went to court (and to the media) to
request that their daughter, dying of cystic fibrosis, be placed on the
eligibility list for a lung transplant. The court’s decision, UNOS’s followup
(Sarah got a new, fictitious birthdate to qualify to receive adult lungs), and
Sarah’s two double-lung procedures galvanized the transplant community,
bioethicists, policymakers, and the public alike.
Even as efforts
continue to increase the organ supply, what should we do about our allocation
systems? In this Medical Center Hour, three experts engage the medical, legal,
and ethical questions raised by the Sarah Murnaghan case.
