University Hospital restarts kidney transplant program

USC University Hospital’s kidney transplant program resumed operations Monday, two months after doctors transplanted the wrong kidney into a patient who survived the error.

Hospital officials voluntarily suspended the transplant program Jan. 29 to investigate the incident and to improve the hospital’s safety standards.

A mismatched kidney could prove fatal, but the patient involved survived the transplant, which occurred Jan. 29.

Human and processing errors were to blame for the transplant mix-up, according to Dr. Cynthia Herrington, USC Hospital’s transplant director.

“It was our process of matching the donor identification number to the recipient’s name that failed,” Herrington said in a statement Tuesday.

The United Network for Organ Sharing’s Department of Evaluation and Quality, a federal oversight agency, reviewed the hospital’s safety and transplant policies in early February.

If a problem was found with the hospital’s procedures, UNOS would have released a report, but no report has come out.

The California Department of Public Health, the licensing agency for hospitals in California and the agency responsible for investigating complaints against hospitals in the state, also conducted an investigation into the hospital’s kidney transplant procedures.

USC University Hospital’s kidney transplant program, which opened in 1991, has performed more than 250 transplants. The program has an average 92-percent patient survival rate and 87-percent graft survival rate at three years post-transplant.