Fletcher Allen has been selected for the National Kidney Registry’s (NKR) Excellence in Teamwork award to honor its participation in the world’s 2nd longest kidney “swap” procedure chain last year. In most swaps, as in this one, it starts with a living donor whose kidney is not a good match for a loved one in need. That donor offers a kidney to the NKR with the promise that their loved one will get one in return from another donor in the same situation. The Registry finds as many matches as possible until the chain cannot be continued. In some cases the first donor has no intended recipient and is just doing it out of generosity.
Meeting this complicated challenge in last year’s swap resulted in 19 top centers providing lifesaving transplants for 28 people, 10 of whom were very difficult to match. This chain was also completed in the shortest period of time to date for such a large number of patients.
”NKR has exceeded what I thought would be possible,” said Carlos Marroquin, MD, division chief of Transplant Surgery at Fletcher Allen and a professor at the UVM College of Medicine. “They have successfully increased the number of transplants in far greater numbers of patients who were previously transplantable at an appreciable rate. Specifically, we refer patients who are highly sensitized with few opportunities for transplant. We are proud and excited to part of this very successful effort.”
About the National Kidney Registry
The National Kidney Registry www.kidneyregistry.org is a nonprofit organization with the mission to save and improve the lives of people facing kidney failure by increasing the quality, speed, and number of living donor transplants. It has coordinated 1,000 transplants since its inception in 2007.
About Fletcher Allen
Fletcher Allen Health Care, together with our partners at the University of Vermont College of Medicine and the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, is Vermont’s academic medical center. Fletcher Allen, along with Central Vermont Medical Center, CVPH Medical Center and Elizabethtown Community Hospital, are members of Fletcher Allen Partners, established to develop a more coordinated system of care throughout the region. Fletcher Allen’s mission is to improve the health of the people in the communities it serves by integrating patient care, education and research in a caring environment. Fletcher Allen also serves as a regional referral center -- providing advanced care to approximately one million people in Vermont and northern New York -- and as a community hospital for approximately 150,000 residents in Chittenden and Grand Isle counties. For more information about Fletcher Allen, find us online at http://www.fletcherallen.org or on our Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blog sites at www.fletcherallen.org/socialmedia.