Pay a higher price up front and get a date for your operation. Or don't and wait. That's the Swiss system. Get a liver for transplanting on a NHS patient, and sell it to the Gulf. That's the British system. Both don't seem very nice.

Medical treatments with a class distinction are becoming more and more common. Two crass cases have happened just recently in Europe and are just showing a general trend. One case happened in Switzerland, one in England. Both countries are known for their highly social health insurance schemes, but seemingly this turns out to be a bane instead of a boon.

Switzerland’s Hirslanden clinics are well known private hospitals operated in a chain system all over the country. One of them, situated in Eastern Switzerland, was recently reported to sell dates for operations. The reasoning behind it being, that patients on the minimal national health scheme could upgrade to private patient status in the clinic by prepaying the difference. Obviously the clinic is under investigation, but would you believe that? It undermines all the decent people paying their health insurance at full and cheats the insurance companies at the same time. What cheek. And the management of the clinic seems not in the least concerned about it. Obviously, what is missing is a law allowing confiscation of such moneys on the spot.

The English case is much graver than the Swiss. King’s College Hospital in London has been going against several regulations, it seems, and its head Professor Nigel Heaton is under investigation. It all started with a donated liver.

St. James’s University Hospital in Leeds had received the liver from a 40-year-old donor. On instruction from UK Transplant, the coordinating body for NHS transplant services, Leeds sent the liver to London for a super-urgent adult NHS patient. So far, so good.

As there are too little donors of livers, a procedure to split livers has been developed in recent years, as livers have the ability to regenerate quite quickly. The process produces a larger lap, which can be used for an adult and a smaller one for a child. Livers age with the donor, and therefore organs of donors above 40 are not split, as regeneration is slower in aged livers.

Having digressed so far, it is quite obvious that King’s split the liver against normal procedure thereby endangering the adult NHS patient. It just is not done that way, guys! Just as obviously, there was now a smaller lap for a child which should have been served back to UK Transplant, but wasn’t. Instead, it was transplanted to a private patient from the Gulf. That Leeds had a child patient who could have benefited from that liver does not make things any better for King’s, either.

In a statement, King’s said they had applied to have the Gulf state’s child considered for priority liver transplantation on compassionate grounds, as the child had rejected an earlier transplant. This proves two things about King’s. First, that they never intended to give the liver back into UK Transplant, instead sneaking it backhandedly through some fiddle fuddle trump up application procedure which doesn’t even exist. Secondly, that they were trying to hush up an earlier incompetent operation which they had obviously botched. The child died later, which doesn’t help the child in Leeds a lot, either.

King’s said that the investigating panel had found that guidelines had been breached and that it had recommended that King’s review its practices and ensure all staff is aware of transplant guidelines. Excuse me? We have the attempted murder on an adult NHS patient because an incompetent professor Nigel Heaton has botched up the transplant on a child and sneaks off with half the liver to patch up his own incompetence. We have a child in Leeds which now might die, because this same professor has been paid handsomely to operate on that same now dead child. And all we do is review practices? What utter unadulterated nonsense comes next?

The lady who sells apples by the pound goes to prison, but Mr. High and mighty and meanwhile, thanks to stolen livers, rich Professor reviews his practices? There should e charges for theft, attempted murder, tried manslaughter, help not offered, selling of stolen goods and god knows what. But we go reviewing practices. I hope the next murderer in court will remember to offer to review his practices.

As King’s and its professor are notorious for cheating and fraudulent dealings, they have private agreements with Cyprus and Greece to treat nationals of those countries with NHS livers for £85,000; it is high time the Government did something. King’s has cashed in over £4 million in these shady dealings already. It is blatantly clear that immediate action must be taken, that regulates donated organs. Principally those organs are part of the estate of the defunct donor, and therefore it should be made clear that the donation involves only the NHS. If the organ is used for mercenary transplants, the hospital or practitioner doing the transplant must be held to transfer the full amount earned to the estate immediately, actually even before the operation.

Are you a donor of organs? I just tore up my donor card. As long as this issue is not completely cleared by government, or by making proviso donation to NHs only, I will not donate, and I ask all donors to do the same as me and to inform their MP that they are doing so. It is the only way to make sure that transplant whores like Heaton can be stopped making money out of our organs donated in good faith.