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Coordinating Organ Sharing
The Coordination Unit for Organ Sharing (UCIO)
Coordination of organ donations and transplants is handled by the OCATT’s UCIO unit. The UCIO operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with one person on duty and another on call, and is supervised by an OCATT employee.
The UCIO works in Catalonia with its own centres and in the rest of Spain through the Spanish National Transplant Organisation (ONT). It also handles organ sharing between Spain and foreign transplant organisations. The most important functions of UCIO professionals are:
· Centralising and updating lists of patients waiting for liver, heart, lung and pancreas transplants. The lists of patients waiting for renal transplants are centralised at the Histocompatibility Laboratory of Catalonia.
· Allocating organs offered to transplantation coordination centres by procurement centres in Catalonia, the ONT or foreign transplant organisations, in accordance with the priority criteria established by transplant advisory committees in Catalonia and agreed upon with the all the Spanish autonomous communities on the Permanent Transplant Committee of the National Health System’s Interterritorial Council.
These criteria fall into two categories, clinical and regional, and are applied on a simultaneous and complementary basis.
Clinical criteria
· The first criterion applied is what is known as emergency level 0: this code is applied to patients in a situation of extreme emergency, i.e. if they do not receive an organ within a few hours, they will die. This criterion has priority for all of Spain. Therefore, a patient in this situation has priority to be allocated the first organ procured at any hospital in Spain.
· Once it has been confirmed that there are no patients in emergency level 0, elective transplantation criteria are applied. In this case, allocation is based on the compatibility between the donor’s and receiver’s blood group, weight and size.
· When allocating organs in elective transplantation situations, regional criteria are applied on a complementary basis.
Regional criteria
· The organ is allocated to the hospital that procures it if that hospital is a transplantation centre.
· If the procurement centre does not have a compatible receiver or is not a transplantation centre, the organ is allocated to another transplantation centre in Catalonia on a rotating basis.
· If there is no suitable receiver in Catalonia, the organ is allocated to one of the transplantation centres in the rest of Spain on a rotating basis.
· Finally, if no compatible receiver can be found in Spain, the organ is offered to foreign transplant organisations.
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· Providing the necessary logistics for organ sharing. From the time an organ is allocated to a transplantation centre until it is transplanted, the UCIO takes all the steps necessary to ensure the entire process takes place as quickly and smoothly as possible.
In order to transfer organs and teams of health professionals to harvest the organ, land transport (by ambulance or with the Catalan police) or air transport (private planes or regular flights) is used, depending on the distance to the centre where harvesting will take place and the time that has gone by since the organ was made available.
· Transplantation information telephone
933 398 303. The UCIO provides a telephone service for people requesting information about organ and tissue donations and transplants, and sends out an informative brochure that includes a donor card.
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More information
· ONT 
The website of the Spanish National Transplant Organisation. www.ont.es |
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