Introduction: The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is tasked with ensuring fair and equitable access to organs for patients seeking transplant. Despite UNOS' position statement clearly stating that prisoner status should not preclude transplant evaluation, prisoners continue to face significant barriers. The goal of this survey was to discover how many American transplant centers are willing to evaluate, list, and transplant prisoners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe transplant community has faced unprecedented challenges balancing risks of performing living donor transplants during the COVID-19 pandemic with harms of temporarily suspending these procedures. Decisions regarding postponement of living donation stem from its designation as an elective procedure, this despite that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services categorise transplant procedures as tier 3b (high medical urgency-do not postpone). In times of severe resource constraints, health systems may be operating under crisis or contingency standards of care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNew York State, and especially New York City, were hit hard by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) virus. While we followed its course in other parts of the world, and began preparations, there was no way we could have been prepared for the volume and severity of illness that began to overflow in our emergency departments and hospital units. We expanded intensive care units into our medical surgical units while turning conference rooms into medical surgical patient care areas.
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