ISTOCK, BARANOZDEMIRBaylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston, a leading heart transplant center, has suspended its transplant program for two weeks, ProPublica and The Houston Chronicle reported jointly on Friday (June 1). The pause in operations comes within weeks of a damning investigative report by the two news outlets revealing extensive troubles with patient outcomes and research misconduct.
“I’m glad they are doing something,” Jennifer Lewis, whose husband died after a heart transplant and numerous follow-up surgeries at St. Luke’s, tells ProPublica and The Houston Chronicle. “That was my hope in speaking out and telling Lee’s story.”
In the case of Lewis’s husband, a mechanical failure in the operating room left the surgeon needing to hand-pump the patient’s newly transplanted heart for 10 minutes. A back-up defibrillator to jump-start the heart was not placed nearby, according to the surgeon, likely causing damage to the organ. The situation serves as an example of the transplant surgery performance at St. Luke’s in recent years: once a pioneering facility when transplants were first becoming available in the 1960s, it now ranks near the bottom in patient ...
