Living Donor Advocacy. an Evolving Role within Transplantation

ABOUT THIS BOOK

· A comprehensive overview of live organ donations and its risks, challenges and future directions
· Facilitates better understanding of the complexities of living donor surgeries, patient evaluations and ethics
· Beneficial to healthcare professionals and patients undergoing transplantation or living donor surgery

The inadequate supply of organs in the United States and other countries continues to drive the reliance on living donor transplantation. Representatives of the transplant community convened for a meeting on living donation in an effort to provide guidelines to promote the welfare of living donors. The consensus statement that resulted from this meeting recommended that transplant centers retain an Independent Living Donor Advocate (ILDA) to focus on the best interest of the donor. Over a decade later, nearly every transplant center in the United States, performing living donor surgeries, has incorporated an ILDA into their living donor screening and/or evaluation process, however there are no guidelines with regard to the ILDA’s qualifications, clinical practice, or how address ethical challenges.

Living Donor Advocacy is an overview of living donation and its risks, ethical challenges and future directions regarding this role within the transplantation process. This book provides health care professionals or consumers of health care with information that facilitates their understanding of the complexity of the living donor surgeries and medical contraindications, evaluation of the donor, and bioethics involved in living donation.

Living Donor Advocacy brings the fragmented information in the literature together into a single, invaluable resource for health professionals and those undergoing transplantation or living donor surgery.

Content Level » Professional/practitioner
Keywords » Ethics - IDLA - Independent Living Donor Advocate - Kidney - Liver - Living Donation, Transplantation - Risks
Related subjects » Internal Medicine - Medicine - Nephrology – Surgery

AUTHORS & EDITORS

Jennifer Steel is an Independent Living Donor Advocate (ILDA) at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Transplant Center. She is also on the executive committee of ILDAs for the National Kidney Foundation, and recently published the results of a national survey of ILDAs in the American Journal of Transplantation and completed a webinar for the Department of Health and Human Services concerning living donor advocacy.