The First 2 Years of Activity of a Specialized Organ Procurement Center: Report of an Innovative Approach to Improve Organ Donation

Abstract

The number of patients requiring organ transplants continues to outgrow the number of organs donated each year. In an attempt to improve the organ donation process and increase the number of organs available, we created a specialized multidisciplinary team within a specialized organ procurement center (OPC) with dedicated intensive care unit (ICU) beds and operating rooms. The OPC was staffed with ICU nurses, operating room nurses, organ donor management ICU physicians, and multidisciplinary staff. All organ donors within a designated geographic area were transferred to and managed within the OPC. During the first 2 years of operation, 126 patients were referred to the OPC. The OPC was in use for a total of 3527 h and involved 253 health workers. We retrieved 173 kidneys, 95 lungs, 68 livers, 37 hearts, and 13 pancreases for a total of 386 organs offered for transplantation. This translates to a total of 124.6 persons transplanted per million population, which compares most favorably to recently published numbers in developed countries. The OPC clearly demonstrates potential to increase the number of deceased donor organs available for transplant. Further studies are warranted to better understand the exact influence of the different components of the OPC on organ procurement.

The Impact of COVID‐19 on Organ Donation, Procurement, and Liver Transplantation in the United States

“…Organ recovery centers, whether off site or on site at the transplant centers, have the potential to allow more efficient, expeditious, and timely recoveries of solid organs that could also mitigate many of the issues created by COVID‐19 to protect OPO and hospital staff, allowing better communication with families, and liberating demands faced by transplant centers to focus on recipient patients. ( 11 ) Doing so would limit transportation to package movements, rather than staffed teams, which would be much less costly and easier to obtain.…”

Advanced considerations in organ donors

“…Furthermore, SDCF procurement led to significantly higher organ yield for both standard criteria donors (3.92 vs. 3.7 per donor) and extended criteria donors (2.2 vs. 1.87 per donor) (24). Other organ procurement centers have also shown similar promise in facilitating donor procurements and increasing donor availability (25). While outside the scope of this article, the SDCF model appears to be a cost-effective means of donor management, and it is likely that more OPOs will adopt this model of care in the coming decade (23,24).…”

Potential Disadvantages of Overcentralization of Organ Recovery Centers: Response to Marsolais et al

“…As physicians involved in the Canadian organ donation system, we read with interest the report by Marsolais et al (1). While the team at Hôpital Sacre-Coeur de Montr eal deserves to be congratulated for their excellence in the organ donation, the described model has potential disadvantages, and we believe its advantages have been overstated.…”