Patients over 18 waited 513 days for heart transplants in New York and only 93 days in northern New Jersey.WASHINGTON – If you live in New York City and need a liver transplant, you’ll have to wait almost 10 times as long as patients in similar need across the Hudson River in northern New Jersey.
That’s the startling finding of a new government report released yesterday documenting an alarming nationwide disparity in the availability of organs – livers, hearts, kidneys, pancreases and lungs – to patients waiting for transplants.
“Patients can be disadvantaged by the simple fact of where they live and at what transplant center they are listed,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who proposed sweeping changes in the bizarre system that appears to put geography over medical needs.
Federal rules now mandate that desperately needed organs be offered first to patients in the city or town where the organs are donated and then to patients in their region.
“An organ that could save a life may be literally stopped at the border and denied to a patient for non-medical reasons,” Shalala said.
The disparities between New York and New Jersey are among the most dramatic noted in the report.
Among the shocking findings:
*Patients with blood type O – about 47 percent of all liver-transplant patients – waited an average of 511 days for liver transplants in New York City hospitals, compared to 56 days in northern New Jersey.
*Patients over 18 waited an average of 513 days for heart transplants in New York and only 93 days in northern New Jersey.
*It takes an average of 1,680 days for a patient over 18 to get a kidney transplant in New York City, compared to 863 days in northern New Jersey.
*Lung-transplant patients waited an average of 1,191 days in New York City but only 371 days in northern New Jersey.
The 2,400-page report analyzed factors such as race, age and blood type in transplant candidates. In every case, the report documents major discrepancies depending on region.
The shortest waiting time in the country for a liver transplant is 46 days in Iowa. However, across the border in Nebraska the average wait is 596 days, the report says.
Even among the high-priority or sickest patients, the waiting time for a liver transplant varied depending on where they lived. For example, high-priority patients in Oregon and Oklahoma waited just two days on average for a liver transplant. The sickest patients in Maryland waited 16 days, the report says.
The report says some transplant programs do a better job than others, attracting larger numbers of patients and donors and creating long waits in other areas.
Also, people in some communities tend to be more willing to donate organs than in others.