Transplantation For Paitnets with Liver Disease

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) in North America has adopted minimum criteria for patients to be accepted onto the waiting list for a liver transplant because too many patients were being put onto the list at an early stage (Neuberger and James, 1999). The World Health Organization believes that organs should be allocated on the basis of medical need, and UNOS has stated that allocation should balance medical usefulness and justice. The American Medical Association Committee on Ethical Issues has outlined as criteria for acceptance of a pat

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ve medical data, and is expected to save lives by identifying patients in the greatest need for transplantation within the next three months and giving them the highest priority (UNOS, 2002). The MELD system has been assessed by various committees of OPTN and UNOS which included patients, donors, and their family members, and has been discussed at public meetings. The system will give individual urgency status instead of lumping patients into groups, and will more accurately indicate which patients are most in need of a liver transplant. As a patient's MELD score increase, they will be moved up the list in terms of priority. Length of time on the waiting list will only come into play if two patients with the same MELD score are offered an organ. After one year of using the MELD system, the number of new registrations on the liver transplant waiting list has gone down from 10,579 in the preceding year to 9,317 (Tucker, 2003). The reduction reflects the elimination of the need to put patients on the waiting list early to gain priority for them. The data show that the use of MELD and PELD have reduced the degree of subjectivity involved in placing patients on the waiting list. However, it is recognized that adjustments will
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Approximate Word count = 2606
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)