<scp>EXPRESSION OF CONCERN</scp> : Clinical Observation and Nursing Care on the Prevention of Abdominal Organ Cluster Transplantation Rejection

EXPRESSION OF CONCERN: H. Zhang, L. Chen, G. Gu, Z. Guo, F. Gong, S. Wu, X. Zhang, and X. He, “ Clinical Observation and Nursing Care on the Prevention of Abdominal Organ Cluster Transplantation Rejection,” Journal of Clinical Nursing 22, no. 11–12 (2013): 1599–1603, https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.12079. This Expression of Concern is for the above article, published online on 07 February 2013 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), and has been issued by agreement between the journal Editor-in-Chief, Mark Hayter; and John Wiley & Sons Australia Ltd. A third-party organization contacted the publisher regarding concerns pertaining to deceased donor organ sourcing practices in multiple articles, including this one. Credible reporting has been published widely which indicates that research featuring organ transplantation in China did not comply with international ethics standards. As reported by Rogers et al., organ donations in China were widely sourced from executed prisoners prior to 2010 (Rogers et al. 2019). China officially announced an end to the practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners on 1 January 2015 (Dai and Xu 2015). Prior to the official end of the practice, a voluntary organ donation program was piloted in select hospitals from 2010 to 2014 (Huang et al. 2013). The use of harvested organs from prisoners contravenes ethics guidelines that were in place at the time of publication, including guidelines from the Declaration of Helsinki and the Declaration of Istanbul. The Clinical data and methods section for this article indicates that the study reports on patients who received abdominal organ cluster transplantation in the department of organ transplantation, the first affiliated hospital of Sun Yat-sen university between May 2004–March 2009. The article does not include any information about ethical approval for the study and does not describe an informed consent procedure. No information regarding organ donor sources was included. Because the totality of organ transplant cases described in this article likely occurred before the existence of a voluntary organ donation program, serious doubts remain regarding the origins of these donations. The authors did not respond to inquiries made by the publisher. As such, the publisher and editor are not able to verify where this article received institutional review board or ethics committee approval or informed consent protocols for the retrospective study reported in this article. Furthermore, questions remain as to whether the organ donations reported in the article complied with internationally recognized ethical guidelines in place at the time of publication. The journal has decided to issue an Expression of Concern to inform and alert readers.