US probes Alabama organ donation center; 2 officials fired

[Clark]

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2011/08/us_probes_alabama_organ_donati.html

US probes Alabama organ donation center; 2 officials fired
By Hannah Wolfson

The director and associate director of Alabama's sole organ donation center are under federal investigation and have been fired, officials said Thursday.
The Alabama Organ Center, which collects donated organs in the state and provides them to hospitals, determined that two of its employees had an "improper financial relationship with a vendor," according to Dale Turnbough, spokeswoman for the University of Alabama at Birmingham. UAB's Health Services Foundation administers the center, which is still operating.
FBI spokesman Paul Daymond confirmed an investigation is under way but declined to comment further.
Turnbough said UAB is working with law enforcement and that the problem has nothing to do with the collection of organs, which is continuing as normal.
"Their misdeeds had nothing to do with tissue and organ donation and allocation; every protocol, including consent, was followed correctly," she said in an emailed statement.
She confirmed that Demosthenes Lalisan, the center's director, and Richard Alan Hicks, the associate director, had been fired; their names had been removed from the center's online staff list Thursday. Attempts to reach both on Thursday were unsuccessful.
Lalisan, who graduated from UAB with a biology degree and received a master's degree there, was named director of the Alabama Organ Center in 2006 and had worked at the center for 14 years before that. Hicks, who also graduated from UAB and attended the school of public health there, has worked at the center since 1999, according to his resume.
The center is the federally approved organ procurement organization for the state and provides kidneys, hearts, lungs, livers, pancreases and other tissues to UAB Hospital's transplant program and for other surgeries statewide.
A spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing, which monitors organ centers, said there was no publicly available record of problems at the center and that UNOS' regular audits look only at medical protocols, not finances.
Liz Hackett, public affairs and policy manager for the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, of which AOC is a member, referred all questions to UAB, saying only that the center was cooperating in the case.