Emergency department staff and the organ donation process: recommendations from the joint working group of the National Transplant Organization and the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (ONT-SEMES)

Although 4769 transplants were performed in Spain in 2015 and the organ donor rate reached 39.7 per million population, thousands of patients remain on wait lists. Currently 65% of donors die from strokes and the mean donor age is 64 years. This profile calls for strategies to detect candidates outside the intensive care unit (ICU) and it justifies an ever stronger role for the participation of emergency services in the procurement process. Spain’s National

Transplant Organization (ONT) and the Spanish Society of Emergency Medicine (SEMES) have drafted recommendations whose purposes are to define the responsibilities of emergency staff in this process, to establish protocols for multidisciplinary cooperation that facilitate the identification of candidate donors, and to consolidate a new approach to patient care that will facilitate optimal management of the donor prior to ICU admission.