This 3A hospital holds a permit from the National Health and Family Planning Commission to conduct liver, kidney, pancreas, small intestine, and other types of transplants.

Its organ transplant center conducted its first liver transplant in 1998. It was one of the earliest centers to perform liver transplantation in China. In 2003, it carried out the first living-donor adult liver transplant.720

The center is well-equipped to meet the clinical requirements for various complicated liver transplants and other large organ transplants. Its medical professionals have rich clinical experience in organ transplantation. Its website claims that the center has one chief surgeon / professor, two associate chief surgeons / associate professors, and 3 staff members with intermediate professional titles. Among them, two hold PhD degrees, and two hold master’s degrees.

Geng Xiaoping, the hospital’s vice president and director of its organ transplant center, studied liver transplantation at the Hannover Medical School in Germany and at the liver transplant center of Hong Kong University. In 1998, he completed the first liver transplant in Anhui Province. In the same year, he conducted “research in clinical practice and applications of allogeneic liver transplantation,” which won second prize of the Anhui Science and Technology Progress Award and was the first application of a venous bypass in liver transplantation in China.721

The general surgery department’s vice director Zhao Hongchuan studied under Professor Chen Guihua, a renowned expert in liver transplantation, for his PhD. Zhao studied clinical organ transplantation at Yale-New Haven Hospital and St. Josef Hospital of Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. He has successfully implemented a large number of transplants, including kidney, liver, liver-kidney and combined abdominal organ transplants.722

The hospital’s organ transplant center wrote in its hospitalization process, “Other than emergency liver transplants, the preparation time for elective liver transplants usually requires 1-4 weeks. The goal is to understand your physical condition and whether you have a contraindication for the procedure, but it is mainly dependent upon whether there is a matching donor.” This implies that the wait time for a donor for elective liver transplantation is between one and four weeks.723

Organ transplant center
The hospital’s website indicates that its liver transplant center has 28 formal beds and features highly mature surgical skill and perioperative treatment. Let alone, it is suspicious that such a large scale transplant center has only 28 beds, it further states that the center had performed 23 total liver transplants of various types, as of May 2010.724 This implies that, in the 13 years after 1998, the center performed an average of fewer than two liver transplants a year, a figure that far from justifying its 28 beds and custom-developed follow-up management software. Furthermore, a liver transplant conference that the center hosted in September 2011 was attended by more than 30 patients who had received liver transplants at this hospital.725

According to the hospital’s website, to manage the follow-up work of the center’s large volume of liver transplant patients, the center’s director Geng Xiaoping instructed associate chief physician Zhao Yijun to design and work with Hefei Hengtong Software Development Company to develop the “Kangheng Medical Follow-Up Management System,” which entered clinical use in April 2012 and was granted a national patent (number 2012SR096297) that November.726

The urological surgery department has 100 beds and 77 medical professionals, including 6 chief physicians, 6 associate chief physicians, and 12 PhDs and PhD candidates. The department has a dedicated kidney transplant team, which was one of the earliest groups in the province to begin conducting kidney transplants in the 1970s. 727