Federal Oversight in Organ Donation Safety

The federal government's first responsibility is to protect human life and patients.

When Americans register as an organ donor, they make one of the most generous decisions imaginable.

One donor can save up to eight lives and enhance dozens more.

Yet today, more than 103,000 Americans are waiting for life-saving transplants.

Every one of those donors, every one of those families, every patient waiting for that gift deserves complete confidence that our organ donation system is safe,

ethical, and worthy of their trust.

That confidence also depends on physicians and nurses and transplant professionals who

performed a record-setting more than 49,000 organ transplants last year.

They deserve a system that respects their medical judgment and puts patient safety first.

Maintaining that trust requires strong federal oversight.

Under the Biden administration,

HHS failed to hold organizations accountable when serious patient concerns emerged.

Today, we are restoring that accountability.

We will not tolerate organizations that compromise patient safety or betray the trust of donors or their families.

I am announcing that HHS has become the decertification of Network for Hope,

the organ procurement organization serving Kentucky and parts of Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia.

We reached this decision after extensive reviews by CMS and HRSA found persistent patient safety failures despite repeated oversights,

repeated warnings, corrective action plans, and multiple opportunities to improve.

Federal reviewers found serious deficiencies in nearly 30% of the cases that they examined.

We found patients placed on the organ donation pathway who should have never been there.

We found cases with the donation process continued despite signs that patients were not appropriate organ donors.

We found repeated failures in clinical judgment, oversight, and patient safety.

And we found that these problems continued even after the organization promised to correct them.

These failures had real consequences.

One of those cases involved T.J. Hoover. T.J. showed signs of awareness while on the operating table about to have his organs removed.

Physicians refused to proceed with the organ recovery because they believed that he was still alive.

Because they acted, T.J. is alive and is here with us today.

T.J., we are grateful that you're here and we're grateful to those physicians who had the courage to do the right thing.