Transplant programme patients left guessing

Patients needing a pancreas transplant say they are none the wiser about their situation after Beaumont Hospital in Dublin issued a statement on the future of the country’s pancreas transplant programme.

Beaumont issued the statement “to clarify a number of issues” just before the patients delivered a petition signed by 15,000 people to the hospital urging it not to abandon them.

One of the patients, Dublin teacher Rachel O’Hora, 32, said the hospital had offered her a clinical appointment shortly after her radio interview yesterday. Ms O’Hora, who needs a kidney and pancreas transplant, said the patients wanted a guarantee that the pancreatic programme would start within the promised timeframe.

Health Minister Leo Varadkar had said the transplant programme would be re-established at St Vincent’s from September.

Beaumont Hospital said a “hiatus” in the pancreas transplant programme was created following the retirement of the country’s only pancreas transplant surgeon at the end of last year.

Both Beaumont and St Vincent’s University Hospital have begun a “collaborative approach” to pancreas transplant with a view to resuming the programme. All future pancreas transplants are to take place at St Vincent’s which is also the national centre for liver transplant and the treatment of pancreatic cancer.

Beaumont said eight patients on the waiting list for a pancreas transplant attended a joint assessment clinic last Friday and a further assessment clinic had been arranged for mid-September: “Work is continuing to put the appropriate infrastructure in place to commence pancreas transplants at St Vincent’s University Hospital in the coming months,” it said.

Beaumont has three vacancies for transplant consultants, including that of retired pancreas transplant surgeon, Dr David Hickey. It said two position offers had been made in recent months but were not accepted by the successful candidate. It added that the existing four transplant surgeons at the hospital had maintained an active kidney transplant programme and in the past month 20 such transplants had taken place.

However, Ms O’Hora said she was waiting to go on a pancreas wait list.

“The statement is no comfort to patients like me because it does not give a start date for pancreas transplants,” she said.

Ms O’Hora, who has been a diabetic since she was eight and suffers from kidney disease, has to go on dialysis for nine hours every night: “When I compare myself to other people who are on the waiting list for a pancreas transplant they seem to be a lot sicker than me.”

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One woman awaiting a transplant, Ciara Kelly, said she was getting weaker every day. “I’m afraid that, by the time they sort this out, my body will be too weak for a transplant,” she said.