The organ retrieval team at Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have won a prestigious national transplant award for their pioneering work on paediatric heart transplants.
Alongside Great Ormond Street Hospital, they won in the ‘Excellence in Organ Retrieval’ category at the ‘NHS Blood and Transplant and British Transplantation Society Excellence Awards’ at their joint congress.
Mr Pradeep Kaul, Consultant Surgeon, and Jennifer Baxter, Lead Nurse for Organ Retrieval and Donor Care Physiologist, accepted the award via video call on behalf of the two hospitals.
The two hospitals performed six paediatric donation after circulatory death (DCD) heart transplants in 2020 despite the coronavirus pandemic.
They are the first DCD paediatric transplants in the world where the donor heart has been reanimated outside the body on a portable perfusion machine called the Transmedics Organ Care System.
Under the collaboration, Royal Papworth’s organ retrieval service team retrieve the heart from the donor, put it on the OCS and monitor it’s health and performance before delivering it to GOSH who perform the transplant.
Richard Quigley, Lead Nurse for Transplant at Royal Papworth Hospital, was also ‘highly commended’ in the ‘Excellence in Patient Care’ category for his exemplary work in caring for our transplant patients both before and after transplant.