The final draft of the bill on human transplants will be sent to Parliament for public debate and adoption, the Health Ministry announced on Wednesday.
The National Transplants Agency (ANT) and the Health Ministry have drafted a bill on human transplants, “in order to set national legislation in line with European directives on standards of quality and safety concerning human organs destined for transplants, and to simplify the legislative framework by including in the new law 11 legislative acts from the field of human transplants.”
The Health Ministry announced on Wednesday that it has decided that the final draft of the new bill on human transplants should be sent to Parliament for public debate and adoption, and that Minister Florian Bodog has invited the representatives of the associations of transplant patients “to continue the process of debating this bill and to hold talks on the situation in this field.”
The bill on human transplants is listed under the heading “Legislative acts in transparency” on the Health Ministry’s website, having been posted on 6 October 2017.
Former Health Minister Vlad Voiculescu recently talked about the bill on transplants, a bill according to which the decision concerning the beneficiary of a donor’s organ belongs to the head of the medical team that analyses the transplant, Voiculescu pointing out that with this initiative Minister Bodog not only fails to take any measure against abuses the likes of those carried out by physician Mihai Lucan but “does precisely the opposite.”
“While an entire country is horrified by the illegalities of Mr Lucan, by the way in which the patients’ lives depended on his whims and appetite to get rich, Mr Bodog, Health Minister for more than 12 months, not only fails to take any measure to stop the abuses and crimes… but does precisely the opposite! According to the new bill on human transplants, proposed by Mr Bodog’s team and by the Zota-Deac team from the ANT, illegality becomes law,” Vlad Voiculescu wrote on his Facebook account.
He puts the spotlight on Article 57 (2) of the bill, according to which “selecting the receiver falls on the head of the surgical team that carries out the transplant procedure, after consulting the other specialists involved.”
The former Health Minister’s conclusion is that “the allocation legally becomes the privilege of the head of the surgical team… who will have, this time with the law in hand, the right of life and death over his patients, being hindered by absolutely no rule.”
Vlad Voiculescu goes on to present how the allocation of organs for transplant is being done “in the civilised world,” giving Eurotransplant as an example, presented as “the international organisation that Romania has been repeatedly invited to join, an invitation refused just as many times by the heads of transplants in Romania.”
