This hospital has over sixty years of history. This comprehensive 3A hospital has nearly 1,300 beds and plans to expand to 2,000 beds within three years. It has about 300 medical personnel with senior and associate senior titles, 7 master’s advisors, and 80 doctoral and master’s students (including those trained overseas).635
In 1982, the hospital carried out the first kidney transplant in Anshan City.636 It has also conducted the most kidney transplants among hospitals in Anshan. In 2005, it performed the first liver transplant in the city.637 As soon as the patient arrived at the hospital, a donor with a matching liver was found.638 In 2006, the hospital’s heart center completed the first heart transplant in Anshan.639
Chi Shuping, the director of its urologic surgery department, studied in Shanghai Changzheng Hospital’s urologic surgery department and kidney transplant center in 1999. He began to perform kidney transplants in 2001.640 He is a member of the Liaoning Organ Transplant Subcommittee. His “Treating End-Stage Uremia with Kidney Allograft” project won a first-prize Anshan Municipal Science and Technology Award in 2006.
According to a WOIPFG telephone investigation recording, staff at this hospital claimed to have sufficient donors, and that people from Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai often came here by plane to pick up organs.641
After the organ harvesting crimes were exposed in 2006, an investigator made two inquiry phone calls to the hospital (also called the Anshan Tiedong Hospital) under the guise of a patient’s relative. Below are excerpts of the two transcripts:642
First inquiry:
A nurse in the Kidney Surgery Department: Don’t worry about blood type. We care more about the physical condition of the patient; we have just finished nine cases. If you want to come, you’d better rush. We do several operations simultaneously.
Second inquiry:
Investigator: May I ask whether you are able to conduct a kidney transplant?
Nurse: Yes, we are.
Investigator: How much does it cost for an operation?
Nurse: Regarding kidney transplants, from tissue matching, to locating the organ source, to the operation, it’s going to be somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 yuan.
Investigator: What’s the success rate?
Nurse: 95%.
Investigator: It’s unheard of that hospitals in Anshan can do this. How many such surgeries have you performed?
Nurse: We’ve done 100 cases, 40 of which were last year. Last month alone, we had 10 cases.
Investigator: Are your surgeons all local or from other regions?
Nurse: We just have local surgeons.
Investigator: How long do we have to wait?
Nurse: It depends on the blood type. Some can be operated on right away, while others may need to wait for several months.
Investigator: Is the source of your organs executed prisoners, or could it be that they’re from the [sic] elderly, the weak, the invalid, or the handicapped?
Nurse: The source of our organ transplants is kept confidential.