Essay On Organ Transplants

Each and every day there are as many as 79 people receiving organ donations that will change their life, but on the other hand there are many people who die from failed organs while they are waiting for transplants that never happen for them (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2016). People find out that one, or even several of their organs are failing and they are put on a list to receive a transplant with no intended time frame or guarantee. Organ transplants are an essential tool when it comes to saving someone’s life from a failing organ; the history of organ transplants, organ donation, and the preceding factors of organ failure all play a very important role in organ transplant in the United States. Transplantation has been

The first successful transplantation between two humans was a corneal transplant, done by an Austrian ophthalmologist (Mantel, 2011). After this successful procedure, the corneal transplant became a routine operation. Corneas have no blood vessels in them, which classifies them as non-vascularized, which is why they were so successful and became routine. When something is non-vascularized it means they are not connected to the blood and lymphatic system which in turn allows them not to be destroyed as foreign by the immune system (Mantel, 2011). As transplantations progressed, more surgeons started to transplant vascularized organs. After many failed attempts and organ rejection, in 1954 a Boston surgeon named Joseph Murray transplanted a kidney from one identical

Organ failure is often known as the final step that precedes death in patients that are critically ill. One of the main causes of organ failure is sepsis, which is the body’s severe response to infection. There is now a specific assessment known as The Sequential Organ Failure Assessment, otherwise known as SOFA, to identify early organ failure, give it a score and base interventions off of these scores (Sakr et al., 2012). Organ failure can also take place from a transplanted organ. It is known that 7% of people’s transplants fail within a year and within three years 17% of these transplants failed (Tushla, 2016). On March 21, 1984 an organization known as the United Network for Organ Sharing was developed and is an independent, non-profit organization (United Network for Organ Sharing, 2015). This network is available to all hospitals in efforts to match donors with recipients in a timely manner. In the 1950’s, if an organ could not be used at the hospital it was it there was no way of knowing if it could be used anywhere else. In this time, it was not that there were not enough donors but more of a problem of finding the right matches in time. The United Network for Organ sharing first started with all of the recipients on paper logs, while communicating through the