The excellent success rates in terms of survival and quality of life in transplantation medicine have led during recent years to high levels of demand. However, organ donor rates and hence transplantation probabilities have remained unchanged. Despite all the advantages many patients cannot benefit from such therapy. The improvement in the number of the available organs for transplantation is a permanent challenge for health-care organizations. The project aims to develop applicable methodology that could be used to determine both, the potential for organ donation and its outcome, as well as to define the limits for organ's safety and quality. This will be used to develop applicable actions to improve organ availability: - Design and validation of statistical tools that could explore relations between, general and specific mortality rates, social and demographic data, health systems and potential and actual organ donation rates, will offer helpful indicators to understand the main factors affecting organ donation. - The implementation of hospital-based programs to evaluate and monitor the donation process will contribute to draw up and implement the necessary changes. - European cooperation in sharing information on the outcome of the so called expanded grafts will be crucial to define the limits of safety and quality of those organs coming from elderly donors, or donors with rare conditions or diseases, or positive viral markers among other risk factors. DOPKI will include organizations from 12 European Countries. Additionally, Eurotransplant Foundation is recruited. It will establish a link with WHO, through which the collection of donation and transplantation data that is being done for 13 Latin-American and the 33 Council of Europe countries since 1994 in Spain, will be extended to other countries around the world. At the same time WHO shall be able to disseminate the conclusions and the designed working tools to other WHO regions.
Keywords:
Transplantation, organ donation, organ donors, encephalic death
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