new campaign to speed the next million transplants by encouraging more people to register as organ donors.Yet the nation’s transplant system is at a crossroads.
More people than ever are getting new organs — a record 41,356 last year alone. At the same time, critics blast the system for policies and outright mistakes that waste organs and cost lives.The anger boiled over last month in a Senate committee hearing where lawmakers blamed the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit that holds a government contract to run the transplant system, for cumbersome organ-tracking and poor oversight."This is sitting on your hands while people die," Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, told the organization’s chief executive as she and other senators suggested UNOS should be replaced.UNOS continually takes steps to improve organ supply and equity and won't be satisfied until everyone who needs a transplant gets one, CEO Brian Shepard responded.Other experts say the fireworks are a distraction from work already underway."Everybody would like the system to be better," said Renee Landers, a Suffolk University health law expert who, as part of an independent scientific advisory panel to the government, co-authored a blueprint for change earlier this year.That blueprint, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, sets a five-year deadline for improving every part of the complex transplant system — including the groups that collect organs from deceased donors, transplant centers that decide which ones to use, and the government agencies that regulate both."Focusing on only one aspect is actually not going to achieve" that goal, Landers said.