Transplant canceled due to lack of staff, the cry of alarm from a patient and associations at the University Hospital

It happens that the Toulouse University Hospital declines the allocation of an organ from the biomedicine agency, due to a lack of a sufficient number of dedicated caregivers to carry out the operations. And this despite an increasing number of patients waiting for transplants. As a result, the deadlines for scheduling an operation are lengthening, as several patient associations denounce.

Tuesday September 3 will remain a dark day in Abdallah’s memory. A day of loss of hope, which he testifies to this Wednesday in The Parisian. Seriously ill and suffering from kidney failure, this Syrian citizen has been a refugee in France since 2022 thanks to the humanitarian corridor system. The man is awaiting a double kidney and pancreas transplant. He lives and is treated in our region, at the Toulouse University Hospital (Haute-Garonne). Like more than 21,800 people, he is waiting for a transplant to finally be able to do without dialysis, resume a normal life, be able to work, integrate into his new country.

At the beginning of September, a phone call. Suddenly, hope : a kidney as well as a pancreas compatible with his rare blood group are available for him. A surgeon agrees to operate on him. On September 3, Abdallah rushed to Rangueil hospital. But the day does not go as planned. He waits, waits some more. Then, in the dead of night, the terrible announcement falls : there is no complete healthcare team available to ensure his transplant. The double operation is canceled at the last moment.

That day, two of them, Abdallah and a second patient, were called in to undergo an operation. But only one team is available, only the liver transplant of the other patient could be carried out. Contacted, the management of the CHU explains: “The organs of the two patients arrived in the middle of the night, and it would have been necessary to transplant them simultaneously. But our organization is designed to allow the transplant of only one person per night, not two.”. Half-heartedly, we recognize over the phone a scarcity of competent operating room nurses to complete a transplant team. Without a second full team of caregivers available that night, hope vanished for Abdallah. The Toulouse University Hospital declined the allocation of the kidney and pancreas to the Biomedicine Agency.

In a press release dated September 30, the management of the CHU qualifies “exceptional situation” the need to perform two transplants simultaneously in the middle of the night. She says “hearing the incomprehension and disappointment of the patient who was not able to benefit from the kidney/pancreas transplant”.

According to several patient associations contacted by us this Wednesday, the deadlines for organizing a transplant have tended to lengthen considerably at the Toulouse University Hospital over the last eighteen months, due to a lack of sufficient numbers of units and teams available. to meet needs.

“The situation is becoming catastrophic for patients! It is even rumored that grafts are not taken even though they are available, or even thrown away, due to a lack of available operating room and team of caregivers!” deplores Frédéric Escala, president of France Rein Midi-Pyrénées.

He himself received a transplant fourteen years ago. “At that time, the waiting time was already 2 to 3 years, but today, patients wait five years on average” assures Frédéric Escala. According to him, this is the consequence of a lack of donors but also of a lack of available healthcare personnel, in a health system in crisis. “We assume that arbitrations are being made. We alerted the management of the CHU by e-mail in April but we did not obtain a response”affirms this patient representative. According to him, Abdallah’s case is “unfortunately recurring”.

So with other patient associations, they intend to continue to question the management of the CHU regarding its organization. “Two blocks should be available at the same time”exclaims Thierry Gesson, also a recipient of a transplant several years ago, and today president of Midi Cardio Greffe Occitanie. “Abdallah’s case is not an isolated case. We are fully aware that there are difficulties in getting a transplant scheduled, particularly when it comes to transplanting a donated kidney by a living person, but management has not yet given us any explanation and the teams continue to work at a tight pace.says Thierry Gesson. Contacted this Wednesday, the professor in charge of coordinating the Nephrology and Organ Transplantation department of the CHU indicated that he was waiting for the agreement of his general management to be able to speak publicly on the subject and answer our questions.

In France, the number of people waiting for a transplant is increasing sharply from year to year. At 1^is January 2016, 14,500 people were waiting for an organ transplant in France. At the start of 2024, there were 21,800 of them, according to statistics from the biomedicine agency, and even more according to the collective of patient associations Greffes.

However, between 2016 and 2023, the number of transplants at Toulouse University Hospital decreased by 2.4%. Indeed, according to figures made public by management, 286 patients were transplanted there in 2023 (source: press release sent to the press), compared to 293 in 2016 (source: CHU website).

Last April in the columns of The Dispatchthe coordinator of the Organ Transplantation department of Toulouse University Hospital also sounded the alarm, citing his fear of a drop of 18 to 30% in kidney transplants from living donors in 2024.

In a press release, the management of the Toulouse University Hospital ensures that “the transplant activity constitutes a priority of the medical project of the new establishment project, validated in April 2024” and that the number of transplants carried out over the period from January to August 2024 increased by 8% over one year.

Abdallah continues to go to the hospital three mornings a week to benefit from dialysis, but confides to Parisian to have “lost all hope” to receive a new transplant.