US moves to shut a Kentucky organ donation group, citing safety failures

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The Trump administration said Wednesday it will shut down a Kentucky organ donation group accused of continuing plans for organ retrieval from some patients who unexpectedly showed signs of life.

While those surgeries were canceled, the cases made headlines several years ago, prompting a spike in people around the country revoking their organ donor registrations.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the nonprofit Network for Hope “a bad apple” and accused it of “persistent safety failures” in announcing the government was starting the process to decertify it.

Network for Hope is one of about 55 organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, that coordinate the recovery of organs from deceased donors and help match them to patients on the nation’s transplant list. In a statement, Network for Hope said it “strongly disagrees” with Kennedy’s decision and will appeal.

Among the allegations is that in 2021, Network for Hope’s predecessor organization pressured a local hospital to proceed with plans to withdraw life support and retrieve organs from a man despite signs that he was waking up from a drug overdose. The man survived and his sister joined Kennedy at a press briefing Wednesday, thanking him.

OPOs cannot declare if someone is dead — only a doctor at the hospital treating the person can do that. Only after that declaration can a donor agency assume responsibility for the deceased, looking for potential recipients and scheduling surgeons to come in to retrieve the organs. Most donations come from people declared brain-dead. But sometimes doctors say a patient has a nonsurvivable injury and the family decides to withdraw life support — and in certain circumstances, that also can allow for donation.

In its statement, Network for Hope said it complies with all federal organ policies. It said that over a year ago it implemented a “first-of-its-kind” new safeguard allowing anyone — including health professionals or family members — to call a pause in donation planning if there’s any concern the patient won’t be appropriate.

Kentucky recently passed a law mandating that pause and the federal Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network is working on new rules that also would require all the nation’s OPOs to implement it.

More than 100,000 people are on the U.S. transplant list, the vast majority seeking a kidney, and thousands will die waiting for a new organ. There were more than 49,000 transplants last year, a record despite a small drop in donations from the deceased — the first such dip in a decade.

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