“The overwhelming majority of those who choose to become organ donors cannot realize their wishes, since most deaths occur outside of a hospital,” said Dr. Lewis Goldfrank, director of emergency services at Bellevue Hospital Center, in a press release.
About 8,000 New Yorkers await life-saving organ transplants. Backed by a $1.5 million federal grant, the city, NYPD, Fire Department, and Bellvue Hospital have joined forces to recover organs from donors who die outside of hospitals and bring them to those who need them.
Similar programs have met with success in Spain and France, but the New York City initiative is the first of its kind in the United States. The pilot is currently confined to kidney and liver transplants, with organs taken from cardiac arrest victims. Goldfrank explained that these are the easiest transplant scenarios to work with.
“We had to reach an agreement with all [of] the agencies—city, state, and federal. We had to prove that it could be done and that we could cooperate with all people and all cultures across the city, so we thought the best and the easiest [transplants] should be done [first],” he said.
Candidate donors must meet several qualifications designed to filter for the most ideal cases. For example, they must be between the ages of 18 and 60 and meet certain medical history requirements.
Goldfrank is hopeful that if this system works, it could then be extended to many other potential donors.
The pilot will be implemented in Manhattan until May 2011, at which time an official review will determine whether to expand it to the other boroughs.
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