‘Parameters exceeded’ at dedicated centre

In December 2006, the Government commissioned an Organ Donation Taskforce to review practice and put forward recommendations to increase the number of organs donated for transplantation. Its report, published in January 2008, made 14 recommendations which, if implemented, could result in a 50 per cent increase in organ donation by 2013. After reviewing the report, however, the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (the Trust) realised that an increase in organ availability would not necessarily increase the number of transplantations unless the infrastructure required to undertake such operations was also increased. Additionally, because of its unpredictable nature, transplant activity impacts on elective surgery, which often has to be cancelled at short notice to allow the transplant to take place. This creates a great deal of distress for both patients and their families. It was felt that a significant increase in transplant activity would exacerbate this problem. To avoid a situation where it might be forced to cancel elective operations, the Trust therefore decided to build new facilities that would be dedicated to undertaking transplant activity.

A long transplant history

Newcastle, in fact, has a long and successful history of caring for the most clinically compromised patients, often at end-stage organ failure, and for whom transplant surgery may be the only treatment option available. A live donor kidney programme began at the city’s Royal Victoria Infirmary as long ago as 1967, followed by the establishment of a cardiac transplantation programme at Newcastle’s Freeman Hospital in 1985. Major breakthroughs followed in the mid-1980s, with a pancreas transplantation programme; the first successful heart transplantation for a baby in the UK (1987), the first successful single lung transplantation in Europe, and, in 1990, the continent’s first successful double lung transplantation. The Trust’s teams of clinical experts are internationally renowned for their pioneering spirit, with a history of performing major breakthrough surgery and advancing new and innovative treatments and techniques. It was therefore fitting that the newly completed Institute of Transplantation (IoT), which is unique in the UK and one of only four such medical centres of excellence in the world, should be located at the city’s Freeman Hospital, where so much exceptional transplant surgery and research work has been undertaken in the past 20 years.