I was completely shocked by the disparity in the transplant waiting list that was discussed during the talk. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been since we have seen so many extreme health disparities in this class, but I assumed that once you were on a waitlist for a transplant it would come down to availability and necessity for who got the transplant. But considering that most of the people waiting are minorities and most of the people getting the transplants are white, obviously something else is going on here.
Also the idea that there are benefits to being slightly obsess when on dialysis but then the patients are expected to lose weight to get a transplant is rather absurd, especially if it is being more apparent that moderate obesity wouldn’t create as many issues post transplant as was previously thought (though many systems are incredibly slow to adapting to research results no matter how many times they are replicated). What most shocked me was that there were such vastly different policies at different centers and patients for the most part don’t have access to these policies to know if they are eligible to get a transplant at this center without having to go in and pay for the examination. This system really needs adjusting to account for the favor it provides to higher socioeconomic status patients.
I appreciate that Gardiner thoroughly went over all of the limitations of her studies and used a comprehensive mix of quantitative and qualitative data collect and analysis procedures. The two categories of data she collected helped give a really holistic picture of the process of going through dialysis and transplant and the systems associated with both of them.