Transplantation Direct - Highlighted Article
Dr. Peri Husen, Editorial Fellow, Transplantation
A Survey of Current Procurement Travel Practices, Accident Frequency, and Perceptions of Safety
Schenk AD, Washburn WK, Adams AB, et al.
Transplantation Direct: October 2019 - Volume 5 - Issue 10 - p e494
In this article, Schenk and coworkers address the issue of procurement-related travel safety, as transplantation is a unique specialty in which surgical transplant teams routinely travel by air and ground to remote donor hospitals at night or tough weather conditions. In order to assess the experiences made and attitudes formed, these individuals (surgeons and members of ASTS on the mailing list in August 2017) were addressed via a 32-question survey. Current travel practices, accident frequency and surgeons’s perception of risk were among the parameters assessed. Interestingly, 23% of respondents reported involvement in at least 1 procurement-related travel accident, and 11% of respondents actually felt „very safe“. Since the shift to broader distribution of organs accurs throughout all organ groups, the average distance between site of procurement and recipient hospital will increase. This could lead to an increase in travel-related accidents. One suggestion of the authors to address this issue, is to pursue procurement by local teams closest to the donor site and transporting the organs to the recipient site later, rather than transporting recovery teams from the recipient hospital. Overall, the aspect of provider safety should be a dominant aspect of procurement practices, which the authors in this article neatly address.
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