The Trials and Tribulations of Urgent Lung Allocation

Waitlist mortality for lung transplant recipients continues to be a problem for transplant programs, with recent analysis from the UNOS database suggesting 14.7 percent of patients die or are delisted awaiting donor organ allocation.1 With the ongoing imbalance between graft supply and recipient demand, organ distribution policies have evolved to prioritize allocation to those patients with the least amount of time to live. In designing such allocation algorithms, four basic ethical principles are generally considered including patient autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice.
Source: The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation - Category: Transplant Surgery Authors: Tags: Editorial Source Type: research