This provincial comprehensive hospital has 2,145 open beds, more than 600 senior specialists, 62 experts recognized for “outstanding contributions,” 143 master’s and PhD advisors, and 403 staff with master’s and PhD degrees.933
The hospital has reached an advanced level both nationwide and in Yunnan Province in the field of organ transplantation. It successfully completed the world’s first pediatric heterotopic liver transplant (the donor liver was partially cut to reduce the liver volume and was implanted in the spleen nest). It also conducted the first allogeneic hand transplant in southwestern China.934
Its organ transplant center includes a kidney transplant team and a liver transplant team. It has 2 professors, 3
associate professors, and 3 members with PhDs in medicine.
The hospital’s website has deleted the introduction to its organ transplantation department. Based on a version saved on transplantation.org.cn on January 9, 2014, the hospital claimed to have conducted 18 liver transplants between April 2005 and February 2014, and 21 liver transplants to date.935
However, we found a liver transplant study published by one of its doctors, for which the patient sample size was six times the number of transplants that the hospital had claimed. (reference?) These samples were only a small portion of a large number of transplants that met the study criteria. Therefore, the hospital’s actual number of liver transplants is most likely well above the figure of six times the official number.
For example, Mo Yiwo, current director of the Department of Hepatobiliary Surgery, published a study that he conducted on eight piggyback orthotopic liver transplants between August 2000 and July 2002 (23 months).936 Another doctor from the hospital published a paper about lung infections in 55 orthotopic liver transplant patients between April 2005 and May 2007.937 Zeng Zhong, deputy director of the transplantation center, published a paper about biliary reconstruction of 55 orthotopic liver transplant patients between April 2005 and March 2007.938 Another paper randomly selected 12 orthotopic liver transplant patients who underwent the surgery at the hospital between 2007 and 2009.939
The team performed liver transplants for three patients simultaneously on June 24, 2005. Its total number of liver transplants performed puts it at a leading position in Yunnan Province.940 Chen Mingqing, the president of the hospital who passed away in 2012, studied liver transplantation at the University of Colorado Hospital
Transplant Center in the U.S. and the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong.941
The kidney transplant team performed its first kidney allograft in 1983. Professor Ma Chaolong has 29 years of clinical experience in urologic surgery and kidney transplantation. He studied kidney transplantation at the University of Colorado in the U.S. between March 1998 and June 1999.942
The online profile of the hospital’s transplantation department states that it has conducted 41 kidney transplants since 1983, including 17 with living relative donors.943
However, doctors at the hospital published a study in 2008 based on 50 “living relative-donor kidney transplants” between February 2002 and May 2008.944
Based on this number, in the six-year period between 2002 and 2008, the number of “living relative-donor kidney transplants” is three times the hospital’s total claim for the 33-year period. Another study was based on a sample of 18 out of 84 kidney transplants.945 From these fragments, one can see that its publically advertised transplant volume has been severely deflated.
The hospital’s cardiothoracic surgery department is the only qualified lung transplant unit in Yunnan Province. It conducted the first allogenic lung transplant in the province in 2005 and won a provincial science and technology progress award. It also performed an allogeneic heart transplant in the same year.946 The department continuously sends its experts to study at famous heart and lung centers in the United States, Germany, Russia, Beijing Fu Wai Hospital, Beijing Anzhen Hospital, Guangzhou Heart Research Institute, etc.947 The department has 83 beds, including 12 ICU beds, and 6 medical professionals who studied abroad, 4 professors and chief physicians, and 6 associate chief physicians.