Page 5 - Healthcare News Nov/Dec 2022

Dr. Ken McPart- land says there is
a huge need for living do- nations of kidneys.
WWLP’s Mass Appeal — in his quest to find a donor for himself, but also to raise awareness about the urgent need for organs and to spur action.
“I didn’t really want to go public — you sacrifice your personal privacy when you put it out there,” he told HCN. “So I was really hesitant. But from a public-relations standpoint, I realized that if I didn’t tell my story, I couldn’t expect someone else to do it.”
He started with letters to family members, close friends, and clients alerting them to his situation and framing it in the larger context mentioned earlier — that he is one of 100,000 people waiting for a kidney and ‘here are the things
“I didn’t really want to go public — you sacrifice your personal privacy when you put it out there. So I was really hesitant. But from a public-relations standpoint, I realized that if I didn’t tell my story, I couldn’t expect someone else to do it.”
you can do to help me.’ That list included everything from becoming an organ donor on one’s driver’s license to learning how to donate, to perhaps giving specifically to him.
Such proactive steps are becoming increasingly necessary, said Dr. Ken McPartland, medical director of the Transplant Division at Baystate Medical Center, who told HCN that the number of people on waiting lists is growing, the waits are often becoming longer, and the situation has been made worse, at least temporarily, by the pandemic, which prompted many potential living donors to remain on the sidelines out of caution.
“If someone has a living donor, they can get a transplant pretty much right away, which is usually within a few months,” said McPartland, part of a team that handles 50 kidney transplants a year at Baystate on average. “But if they don’t, they sometimes have to wait five to seven years to get a transplant.”
Of the 41,000 kidney transplants performed last year in this country, he noted, only 6,500 involved living donors — the rest of the organs were from those who were deceased, and the waits for those can be very long.
“There’s a huge need for more living donations,” he explained. “We know that people can donate a kidney and do very well and live a normal life. There is a risk, but the risks are is really low, and this is the biggest opportunity for improving not just the number of transplants, but the quality of transplants; we’d be able to help more people earlier in the process.”
Dr. Leo Riella, medical director of Kidney Transplantation at Mass General Brigham, agreed. He said the numbers — specifically those related to the
Please see Organs, page 7
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