Consequences of More Coordinator Engagement to Take Consent for Organ Donation: Comparisons of New Versus Experienced Staff.

OBJECTIVES: The method of obtaining family consent for organ donation after occurrence of brain death in Iran is an opt-in process. Because of complicated cultural, legal, religious, and familial structures in Iran, it is not simple to take consent for organ donation in brain death situations. The process needs the professional staff to be experienced and have an appropriate personality to obtain consent. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We previous used a limited number of experienced coordinators to take consent. We revised our decision 2 years ago because of lack of trained personnel. From the beginning of 2017, we have started training courses regarding approaching families for donations for all interested coordinators. After participants finished the theoretical and practical training, we allowed them to interview themselves to practice a first evaluation for a suitable potential donor. We have continued this strategy and have gathered feedback from participating coordinators. RESULTS: At the beginning of 2017, 9 coordinators who were previously qualified for handling other steps of organ donation were put into a compact training program to train for family interviews. In 2016, the experienced interviewers had a 88% success rate compared with a success rate of 83% in 2017 for inexperienced interviewers (P = .1). No significant differences were shown. Despite younger ages of donors obtained in 2017, median donated organs per donor decreased from 2.81 to 2.66. The average time interval between first contact with families and establishment of family consent was not significantly different between experienced and inexperienced coordinators (9.2 vs 8.7 h). CONCLUSIONS: Although with the new strategy we experiensed a decrease in the consent rate, we believe this strategy will have long-term beneficial effects for our organization and the decreased rate will be a temporary decline. Interviews showed that this strategy made our coordinators more motivated and responsible for their job. As a result, both volume and quality of organ procurement activities will be increased.

Failed Organ Donations After Transfer to an Organ Procurement Unit.

OBJECTIVES: In Iran, each medical university can have one organ procurement unit for its own hospital. If the family consents, all patients with brain death must be transferred to the organ procurement unit. When brain death is officially confirmed and the family gives the second consent, the organs are then retrieved in the operating room. MATERIALS AND METHODS: To minimize the number of "failed donations" (and to reduce their related costs), we studied 685 patients with brain death who were transferred to the Masih Daneshvari Organ Procurement Unit (Tehran, Iran) from 2016 to 2018 in terms of their outcomes. Of these, 623 led to (at least one) organ donation, whereas the remaining 62 had different causes for unsuccessful organ retrieval and donation. RESULTS: Two causes (not officially confirmed and family withdrawal) were responsible for 4 failed donations (0.5%). We focused on the remaining 58 cases, which had principally medical grounds for unsuccessful organ retrieval and donation. These were further subcategorized into 3 groups: expired, unacceptable laboratory results, and exclusion in the operating room. We compared these groups versus the successful donation group in terms of average age, male-to-female ratio, average body mass index, pace of brain death occurrence, and days of hospitalization. Results showed that age, body mass index, and cause of brain death are important predictive factors in differentiating successful and failed donations, whereas sex and days of hospitalization are not so decisive. CONCLUSIONS: Special precautions must be considered before transfer of brain dead donors who are overweight, are of older age, and have nonhemorrhagic causes of brain death. Stricter criteria are needed to control psychologic and financial burdens of failed transfers of deceased donors to the organ procurement unit.

Liver Donation From Marginal Donors: To Donate or Not to Donate?

OBJECTIVES: Livers from deceased donors compose nearly 30% of all organ transplants, and about 700 liver transplants are carried out per year. Marginal livers (extended-criteria donors), however, are not usually accepted by recipient teams, and there is only one center for these procedures in Iran. The final decision is made according to criteria that are much more conservative than other globally accepted ones. MATERIALS AND METHODS: To find significant differences and construct an algorithm to predict the future of marginal livers (before transfer of donors to our organ procurement unit), successfully donated and unsuccessfully donated livers divided into 2 age groups were compared in terms of age, sex, body mass index, liver function tests, significant medical disorders, and preretrieval liver sonography report. RESULTS: In the first age group (50-59 years old), there were 88 successful donors and 27 unsuccessful cases (due to 3 reasons: positive virology tests, death before retrieval, and ruled out by surgeons in the operating room). In the second age group (? 60 years old), there were 45 successful donors and 11 unsuccessful cases. The results showed that there were no differences between successful and unsuccessful cases regarding age and liver sonography results; however, sex, body mass index, liver function tests, and previous medical disorder were different between groups. Donors in both age groups were mostly male (60% and 73%); however, surprisingly, most unsuccessful cases were female (56.6% and 57%). Donors had generally lower body mass index (2 numerical difference), better liver function tests, and less risk factors (heart disease, diabetes mellitus, fatty liver, and chronic alcohol consumption). CONCLUSIONS: Before transfer of marginal liver donors to the organ procurement unit for further evaluation and organ retrieval, one must consider that age is just a number and the presence of other comorbidities can have more decisive roles on liver quality.

Virology Tests in Brain-Dead Donors: Let the Bills Run Up?

OBJECTIVES: In the organ donation process, screening for serologic markers for a selection of agents is essential to prevent infection transmission. The screening of donors for specific potential infections can never absolutely exclude the risk of transmission. For reevaluation of serology tests, we analyzed results of tests requested for all brain-dead donors. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our study included all actual brain-dead donors who were seen from January 2017 to February 2018, received ancillary tests, and had final confirmation of brain death at our organ procurement unit. RESULTS: Most candidates for organ and tissue donation were seronegative for intended agents. We found that 14.4% of the samples were suspicious for infectious and needed further evaluation; 12.2% of donors had positive results corresponding to hepatitis B, and only 1.9% were rejected from donation. Requisiteness to DNA detection for hepatitis B virus infection was mainly related to age over 50 years. CONCLUSIONS: The process of donor screening must systemically assess the donor. At the final stage, essential biomarkers must be investigated. Application of more caution in evaluation of older donors, including more screening tests before transfer to the operating room, remains mandatory.

Difficult Consent Scale: An Assessment Scale for Anticipated Difficulty in Obtaining Consent for Organ Donation.

OBJECTIVES: Seeking consent for organ procurement from a brain-dead patient 's family is challenging, especially in developing countries. In the Middle East, legislation necessitates an opt-in system that engages all first-degree relatives. To improve our success rate in the Masih Daneshvari Organ Procurement Unit in Tehran, Iran, we invented a scale for the consent process to predict the degree of difficulty of each family interview before venturing into it. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We reviewed the records of brain-dead patients treated in our unit over the previous 10 years. Focusing on cases where families refused to donate organs, we searched for determinants that played a role in the final results. We extracted minor and major determinants, then ascribed a 3-level scale to each determinant (from 1, easiest, to 3, most difficult). We thereby obtained a clear assessment of each consent-taking session based on determinants from real encounters. RESULTS: We analyzed 150 brain-dead patients and extracted 17 determinants: 2 major and 15 minor. We grouped these into 3 distinct categories: A, patient-related; B, family-related; C, hospital-related. Inspired by the Glasgow Coma Scale, we named our scale the "Difficulty Consent Scale, " in which a score of 15, using the minor determinants, indicates the easiest scenario for obtaining consent and 45 indicates the most difficult scenario. The 2 major factors function as coefficients to either double or halve the degree of difficulty. CONCLUSIONS: This speculative model may help the managers of organ procurement units choose the best-suited person for any family interview, and it may help clinicians attempting to obtain consent to compare their results over time. Our model must be tested in a real context to discover its predictive power.