Today in Henrico – Lisa Schaffner, UNOS

Lisa Schaffner of the United Organ Sharing Network visits with Tara Gray to discuss the organization and its reach.     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Tara Gray – I'm Tara Gray. Today in Henrico, my guest is Lisa Schaffner, public relations and marketing director at UNOS, United Network for Organ Sharing. Lisa is referred to as the face of UNOS, but before she joined in 2008 Lisa was a news anchor for WRIC-TV eight for over 20 years. Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa Schaffner – Tara, thanks so much. I appreciate it!

Tara Gray – I'm happy to have you. I’m so excited to talk about UNOS.

Lisa Schaffner – UNOS, working together saving lives through organ transplantation.

Tara Gray – So let's share the website contact information and social media first, if you would like.

Lisa Schaffner – All right, well, we've got our main website that we have is UNOS.org, and we are on several social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I encourage all listeners just to visit our website because there's so much information there. And all the links to the social media platforms are very easily there and clickable.

Tara Gray – So UNOS.org Okay, perfect. The history of the nonprofit I feel is important. If you would like to talk a little bit about that we can kind of get started that way.

Lisa Schaffner – Well, I love that conversation. Because, you know, so United Network for Organ Sharing is a Richmond-based national nonprofit. We operate the nation's transplant system and we do it out of Central Virginia, out of Richmond, Virginia. We have no other offices in the entire country. And the reason that Richmond is our home how we got to be here, because so often, people are very just wondering that information is that let me take you back just a little bit. If everyone and I know no one's this old listening to this information, I'm sure, but during the 1950s in the 1970s in that 20-year timeframe, that's when organ transplantation came into its own and primarily kidneys were being transplanted and that was the success – kidneys, with recipients and with donors.

And in the the matching was taking place, how did a transplant take place? It was through that individual transplant hospital. And most of them at that point were teaching institutions. They were research institutions associated with universities like Virginia Commonwealth University. So VCU was very instrumental in all of this. So it was loosely-knit groups of transplant hospitals that were doing the matching of organs and then the transplants were taking place back in the ‘50s. And in through the 1970s in comes an organization called SEOPF, and boy, I'll tell you what transplantation and organ donation has a lot of acronyms. So that stands for the Southeastern Organ Procurement Foundation, and very simply put, this organization was based in Richmond, Virginia. And the foundation was trying just to create this group of people across the country that could share organs. This network of organ-sharing began through SEOPF and then eventually what happened SEOPF turns in United Network for Organ Sharing in March of 1984. So that's how it all progressed.

And Richmond really is the home of organ donation and transplantation. UNOS, a national nonprofit based here. Donate Life America, a national organization on awareness of donation based here, and it's in large part due to Virginia Commonwealth University and that being located in Richmond.

Tara Gray – Ok, that's as far as what UNOS does for listeners that have no idea. Would you like to obviously to get into a little bit of that?

Lisa Schaffner – I would love that. So, again, just so everyone's on that same, as I call it that foundation, we're a national nonprofit, and we run the nation's transplant system. And what that means is we're matching life-saving organs from donors to patients in need. And this matching process is taking place through a computer system. And that computer system operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and UNOS has put together this computer system and because of this organ matching process that takes place constantly, it results in thousands of transplants yearly. And in fact, today, roughly about 109 life saving transplants will take place. That's an across the entire country. Yes, technology plays a huge role. So, so technology, and then UNOS pulls together, is the convener if you would, pulls together all of the organ procurement organizations, and there are 58 in the country, and then it pulls together all of the transplant centers in the country. And there are 253 of those.

And we're in the middle of doing the matching. So the OPOs, organ procurement organizations, are in the donation side, UNOS they're in the middle coordinating everything matching out the organs, and then the transplants take place at all the transplant centers across the country. So that is a visualization of how it all comes together.

Tara Gray – Right. The technology used for transplants is UNET, it would be helpful I think now to elaborate on UNET and then Donornet.

Lisa Schaffner – So UNET, the UNOS Network ,is the whole network that we pull all of this information together, which enables all of the transplant centers to talk together. Donornet is very specifically when a donor an organ donor who is deceased, and that donation takes place in a medical facility at hospitals across the country, information is put into our computer system into Donornet that takes down all of that information of the donor – the weight, the tissue type, the size of the organ, the how the organ is operating.

And so all of that information is put into the, into the computer system so that the best match can be made possible. That comes from the donor to the recipient.

Tara Gray – That's so fascinating. It's really the control center.

Lisa Schaffner – Oh, you know what, Tara, that's a great way to explain it. It is the control center, and we call that the organ center and it literally is a room within our building. We are located in downtown Richmond, and we have they’re there right now as we're talking. They’re called organ placement specialists and they are helping all of our OPOs and all of our transplant centers to make sure that that best match is happening. It's all computerized, and they're watching to make sure that computers doing the match. But there are some cases where the organs have might have a more difficult issue in terms of that match taking place. So they're helping with those conversations. And technology as you were leading into this is huge. So if you think back to the 1980s, which I was very much alive in the ‘80s, in 1986, when we actually started this whole operation through a contract with the federal government, it's called the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. So we operate this network through a contract that we have with the federal government.

And at that time, you were literally taking phone calls and helping to match and coordinate, and then we'd have large, like spreadsheets that were coming and now it's an automatic computerized match. There are just so many bits of data that is beyond your imagination of the computer is generating on a daily basis to make these these best matches take place. And when we talk about this, it's more than just technology. This is life-saving technology. It's it's absolutely amazing. When I talk about it, every time I talk about it, I just get chills.

Tara Gray – It really is, you're painting a picture as you're describing it. And I'm creating this own picture in my mind of what it looks like and what the day to day is like. So I think a good question now is how are donors matched?

Lisa Schaffner – Right, and so let's just start with this. There are a lot more people in need than what we have organs for right now. And so when I say that UNOS matches organs, that's what we do. But it's more of an allocation process, allocation meaning we have to decide who gets it and when, because we have a very much of a limited resource. And so when we're matching organs, there and let's be clear, there are specific life-saving organs are the organs that you have to have to live – heart, lung, liver, kidney, pancreas, intestine. Those are the six life-saving organs.

Skin, tendon, bone, we’re not involved in those matches because they're not life-saving as a whole organ. So we're talking whole organ life-saving. And so each of those organs has different matching criteria that are built into these algorithms into our computer system. But on a very broad brushstroke for our conversation today, there are basically five different matching criteria, if you would, for each of the life saving organs and these are very broad brushstrokes. So organs have to match from the donor to the recipient on these areas: blood and tissue type, which everybody watches any of the medical shows you understand that; the second one would be size of the organ.
Sometimes we have donors who could be pediatric children, infants, and a small heart cannot fit into a six-foot-four, 250-pound grown man. So size of the organ makes a difference. Blood and tissue type size of the organ.

The third is waiting time. So we have a lot of our what we call weightless candidates, they're waiting patients that need a transplant and they're on the waitlist right now we have about 113,000 people in real time across the country as we speak, waiting for a life saving organ transplant. And the longer that you waited, that puts you higher up to make that match happen for you. But of course, all of these things are these matching criteria are all happening and they're movable and it's it's a constantly moving picture. So wait time’s the third one. .

The sickest patients, the sickest patients need to get transplanted first. And if you're not a sick that means you have more time to wait. But that can be a very slippery slope. If you are perhaps you go into have that transplant and you've got a fever, you can't have the transplant. So there's such a thing as being too sick to have the transplant.

And then the fifth matching criteria is what we call is geography. It's where the donation takes place in that donor hospital. It's and where that is, most of the time, the transplant takes close to a recipient who is near that donor hospital. So geography plays a huge role. So though how I paint that picture, if you have a donor that donates a kidney, in Los Angeles at a hospital, and I've got a recipient in Richmond, Virginia, who, let's call it a heart, not a kidney, it's a heart, and we've got someone who needs that heart in Richmond, Virginia. Geography plays a huge role because we cannot transport that heart quickly enough from Los Angeles, California to Richmond, Virginia.

And the reason I kind of changed that nuance a little bit from heart to kidney and kidney to heart is kidneys can be out of the body much longer, we can transport them across the country, they have a 24-hour up to a 36-hour timespan that they can be out of the body that we can actually transport heart only four to six hours.

So you can see the timeframe. When we talk about the donation to the time of transplant, it's a very small window that we have to make that happen.

Tara Gray – There is more than one way to receive an organ and donate one, correct?

Lisa Schaffner – So I think what you're referencing, and the answer to that is yes. There are a couple of different things that I would respond to that question in that there's deceased donation, and there's living donation. And so when we talk about deceased donation, most people are familiar with that. If you go in here in Central Virginia in the Commonwealth of Virginia, you have a heart on your driver's side.

If you have registered to be an organ donor and what that means if and when the time would come that you would die within a medical setting, you agree that you want to be an organ donor, and that your organs, if they're in in the proper condition to be transplanted would be and you would give life to someone. So that's deceased donation.

Then there's also something which I call it a win win. It's called living donation, but not all of the six life-saving organs are available for living donation. Obviously, you have one heart, you can't take it out of one person and give it to another and consider the other person lives. So there are only two organs and that is kidney you've got two kidneys, and as a donor you can give one away to help someone in need and the other is liver. Liver is also living donation, in that the donor would give about two thirds of their liver and it would be transplanted into the recipient and both the donor and the recipient lives. So I call living donation a win-win. And we also through so much of our research that we do have found that these types of transplants work best because the recipient is able to just recuperate so much more quickly, and the transplant tends to last longer as well. So it's just a spectacular way to go.

Tara Gray – So I would love to have you share ways to get involved in donate.

Lisa Schaffner – I would love that. So the first thing that I always would say is have the conversation about organ donation. And if you are so inclined and and have that generous heart and spirit of registering to be an organ donor, please do you can do that by going to our website, UNOS.org, and there's a big tab at the top of the page there that you'd like to register as an organ donor or you can do such as the next time you make a trip to the DMV. So those are just a couple of different ways.

But also, just to get involved with UNOS, we have an ambassador program that you can get involved in. And that's becoming an advocate for United Network for Organ Sharing, an advocate for organ transplantation, and just really opening up on those conversations much more frequently and through your network of people. And we have a lot of events, and they're all changing now because of the pandemic, a lot of virtual and we have a wonderful national donor memorial that is on site, and we would love for people to come and visit that. It's outside. It's a beautiful park-like atmosphere, and it honors all organ, eye and tissue donors. Come visit and you can actually financially contribute to that as well. It's, we are a nonprofit and we do take financial contributions which we would love and encourage you to do that.

We have a, what they call that “give now” button on our website if you're selling well, yes, yes.

Tara Gray – Great. I have to tell you really quickly. I've lived in Richmond my whole life. I've actually lived in two counties. And until just recently, I had not heard of UNOS and stumbled upon it. After I will. My 11-year-old daughter was diagnosed last fall with Type One autoimmune disease type one diabetes. And she actually asked me if she could get a new pancreas. And so I started Googling it and stumbled upon this wonderful nonprofit here in our backyard, and I'm so glad that I now know about UNOS, to be able to help share, you know, everything that you guys do. It's incredible that you guys are changing lives, you're saving lives and this nonprofit is really the gift of life. So I'm very happy to be able to talk with you today and share. So thank you.

Lisa Schaffner – Tara, you are so welcome. And that is exactly what we're about and we invite everyone to come visit us, when you feel that you can do that in your safe and healthy but definitely outside international donor Memorial. So thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about this wonderful organization. I so appreciate it.

Tara Gray – Thank you so much. I appreciate it.