It seems to be a common scene in a lot of medical dramas where a guy is running down a hallway carrying a heart in cooler that looks like this. (of course, there’s also the comedic equivalent where some guy confuses it with their lunch)
I’ve never actually seen this in real life (although I almost got a job earlier this year as a medical courier so I could’ve found out the answer), but it seems like they would use something a bit more “medical” looking.
In the airline biz we used to carry organ shipments in the cockpit. In the late 90s that was banned as too risky a way for somebody to smuggle a bomb into a very vulnerable part of the aircraft. So instead they now go into the cargo compartment 5 feet aft & 3 feet below the cockpit. Nobody ever said the FAA was real thorough.
Most of the ones I carried were in ordinary looking styrofoam coolers like you can buy at any grocery store next to the charcoal & lighter fluid. They might have been a bit more substantial than the grocery models, but not much. Hearts, livers, kidneys; I’ve seen 'em all, at least from the outside. There was probably a bunch of ice in there, then some fancy sterile baggie, then the goods.
Why wouldn’t they? They’re cheap, easily available, and they get the job done. Why make a whole other version just to do the same thing?
Because it’s an unexploited premium niche market, that’s why! Add another $2000 onto the whole transplant bill for a high tech container, which they can get for $1000 and re-use!
It would be in keeping with the best traditions of medical equipment pricing.
I can imagine single-use foam containers might be preferable in that they avoid the need to sterilize a hard-sided cooler between uses. I’m no doctor, but I imagine that, plastic bags or no, you want the container holding that secondhand heart or kidney or whatever to be really clean.
In most blood transfusion service departments I’ve worked at we just use standard coolers you could easily purchase at Walmart. These are for transporting and storing blood products outside the blood bank for up to 18 hours along with packed ice.
It’s not like the go from shelf directly into service though. We have qaulity control and assurance guidelines that must be investigated and recorded before each cooler can be used. Usually we do temp checks every 4 hours for over a day on dummy products in them. Then again every year for the coolers in circulation. Aside from the biohazard labels and warnings not to put platelet in them they look like plain ol’ coolers.
Careful with those styrofoam coolers, though! Someone from the transplant team could trip while carrying in, causing the heart to slid across the floor, whereupon a dog that was in the waiting room will happily pick it up and carry it off…all in full view of the heart recipient.
(For those that are confused (I suspect that’s a lot of you,) this happened in a scene of a recent episode of One Tree Hill. I tried to find clips of it on the net to show off the sheer ridiculousness but failed.)
Yeah, that dog ate the heart, also in full view of the recipient’s estranged son, who found it quite humorous. In fairness, the recipient was an evil bastard.
Also, you must not have looked too hard, a simple google of one tree hill dog heart turned it up in mere seconds:p
Huh. I had kinda thought you couldn’t just cut out parts and move them around like that – don’t they need to be kept attached to the donor as long as possible?
Although they do perform live donor transplants now for things like a lung, a kidney, and even a portion of the liver; I believe the general answer is no. I am not too sure how long the organs are good for over extended times that would require air travel, but often I see cases of transportation between Boston city hospitals.
This. My father was Procurement Manager for a hospital for 15 years; he was its first Procurement Manager in fact, therefore he got to buy things like all the furniture, linens…
His previous job had been in a TV factory. Calling a friend who worked in Sales at that factory got him, with volume discounts and taking into account that TVs to be used as radiology monitors needed a special order (a part had to be left out), prices between 20 and 30% cheaper than what the “preapproved supplier” was asking for. Apparently the TVs in patients’ rooms count as “medical equipment.”
Everything else had similar markups, so yes, lots of items in that hospital come from local supermarkets, hardware stores… I’ve heard people remark that “it’s nice that the bedsheets have prints, makes it feel less like a hospital!” White bedsheets from a “hospital supplier” would have cost twice as much as it cost to go to local home decoration stores and asking for prices on a massive order of 100% cotton bedsheets.
Similar to what Nava was echoing, and what I was mentioning with our blood transport:
ThermoSafe Blood Transport Cooler: $110.64
Why would some hypothetical medical-only super-cooler be easier to clean than an off-the-shelf WalMart cooler?
Maybe because you could sterilize it? Don’t know; only speculating.
You can spray down just about anything nonporous with standard hospital disinfectants – including cheapo plastic coolers. I suppose if you really wanted, you could design a cooler that could multiple trips through the autoclave, but why bother? A couple layers of already-comes-sterile plastic bags will do the same for cheaper.
But yeah, a pox upon hospital purchasing departments. I work in a research lab, so I deal with a different end of things, but there are all sorts of things we want to buy but can’t because they’re not on the Approved Vendor List. One example: we just want ordinary plastic storage bins. To store things. The brand that is on the Approved Vendor List is shit – boxes fall apart after a few months of use, and don’t even think about running 'em through the dishwasher if they get dirty. There is another brand out there that’s just perfect (and we have a few scattered around, by means I’m not aware of) but we can’t buy from them, because the Approved Vendor has a deal where the hospital must buy all plastics from them.
I used to work for a regional airline and the live transplants were shipped in lab variety coolers. They were much smaller, boxy rather than tapered, and much much thicker than a foam picnic cooler. Some had cardboard jackets.
I say lab variety, because I also worked in a lab and saw many used there too.
The larger sizes made for superior picnic coolers with the improved insulation value.
The cheep coolers already have that market niche. The transporter might still add an exorbitant cost, but they still will use the cheapest that works which is a $20 cooler to maximize their profit.
I worked for an ambulance service for a couple of years doing interfacility transports. A couple of times while I was working, we were called out in the middle of the night to pick up a transplant team from the university hospital, take them to another hospital to harvest organs, and then bring them back to the university hospital.
They do in fact just use store-bought coolers. I assume sterility isn’t an issue because the organs aren’t sitting directly on ice in the cooler–they are wrapped in sterile bags while still in the OR. When they get to the other hospital, I’d assume they have the scrub nurse open the bag and give the organ to the team while maintaining sterile procedure, same as they would with any supply.
The people placing the items in the coolers are the medical staff who removed it from the body. The coolers were at that time property of the hospital. Why ship out a $2000 cooler you’ll never see again when you can use a $2 cooler?
If the Medical Transport companies supplied the coolers they’d have to buy enough to keep a stock in each hospital and all the logistics involved with that.
Those styrofoam coolers work better than most plastic and metal coolers. Styrofoam retains the cool better - its just less durable - but if you’re only using it once…Its also highly apparant if the cooler went any rough handling that could damage the organ.
Don’t you have a credit card for expenses? Every couple of months, I go to Target and buy aluminum foil, bleach, non-fat dry milk and other various lab supplies that are 10X cheaper off the shelf than from our suppliers. Our purchasing dept has never had a problem with it.
