Nine families whose relatives died while waiting for a liver transplant have filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the University of California, Irvine Medical Center.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in California’s Orange County Superior Court, also alleges negligence and misrepresentation, contending that patients were given false hope of transplants and added to a waiting list even though the hospital’s program was foundering.
The patients involved in the suit were on the waiting list up to about five years, attorney Lawrence Eisenberg said.
“Ultimately they died because there was no way that UCI could handle the transplants,” Eisenberg said.
In 2005, UCI performed five transplants. The three previous years, it performed a total of eight. In each of those years, the hospital failed to meet federal standards that require programs to perform at least 12 transplants annually.
The hospital has not had a full-time liver transplant surgeon since July 2004 and sometimes turned down livers because no surgeon was available. Even so, the hospital continued recruiting patients for the waiting list.
“UCI totally failed to disclose any problems with the program,” Eisenberg said. “UCI continued to accept patients into a program that had insurmountable problems that they could not correct.”
A UCI spokesman said Friday that officials had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment.
Last month, after reports in the Los Angeles Times detailed the shortcomings, the federal Medicare agency said it would stop paying for transplants and UCI shut down its program.
Federal and state inspectors are reviewing the hospital, which has placed its chief executive on leave.
