When egos come before patient need, something is very wrong
The reasons behind Queensland’s heart transplant service shunning the world-leading technology researchers within its own hospital developed is a sorry tale of deep dysfunction.
The hospital’s heart transplant service was responsible for shunning the “heart in a box” device that made world scientific history.
You’d think it might have been embarrassing for that service – not to mention to hospital’s administrators – when I published on the front page of this newspaper on January 27, 2023, a story headed Gift of Life – Straight from the Heart.
That story reported that donor hearts could now be kept alive and oxygenated in a box for as long as 11 hours using an ingenious medical “Gatorade” perfusion technique developed at the Prince Charles-based Critical Care Research Group.
At the time the story was published, Prince Charles’ own heart transplant service was the only such service in Australia not scrambling to adopt the technology.
The CCRG research and the resulting hypothermic oxygenated perfusion (HOPE) heart-in-a-box technology that has been adopted around the world and allows donor hearts, previously viable on ice for only a few hours, to be kept alive far longer, had even been funded by the charity the Common Good – an initiative of the Prince Charles Hospital.
Yet while every heart transplant program in the country had joined the innovative trial of the device, Queensland’s heart transplant service declined to join – then incredibly, continued to shun the HOPE technology even as it was adopted and being used in transplant practice across Australia. A benchmarking report made public this month that has cast light on the deep dysfunction within the Queensland heart transplant service has redacted the entire section that might tell us the reasons behind this baffling state of affairs.
What I can say is that the reason boils down to nothing more than a clash of personalities.
That’s appalling when you consider that Queenslanders on the waiting list may have lost their lives because the state’s heart transplant service had fewer viable hearts to access directly as a result of that decision.
Worse still is the failure of the administrators of Prince Charles, the Metro North Health Service, to step in on behalf of patients.
The situation of health administrators turning a blind eye to personnel problems within departments is notorious in hospitals around Australia.
In this case, it took a highly critical report by senior interstate clinicians, and the actions of the Crisafulli government in shepherding its publication more than a year after it was delivered, to finally bring to public attention the state of affairs in a deeply dysfunctional heart transplant service. It led to leadership changes and an end to internal wars between colleagues that had been waged for years.
It was only after those changes that Queensland, in April, finally began using the groundbreaking technology that had been developed within its own hospital and with its own hospital’s charitable funding. Queenslanders now finally have greater access to more donor hearts from across the country that can be kept alive for much, much longer.
And not a moment too soon for those whose lives may hinge upon it.
The failure, until recently, of Queensland’s heart transplant unit at the Prince Charles Hospital to use a cutting-edge machine developed just down the corridor from its own operating theatres is nothing less than astounding.