What to gather before you contact a transplant centre
Nothing here decides anything. What a complete file does is let a transplant team answer quickly, instead of after three months of correspondence.
In short
A transplant team cannot say much about a case from a paragraph of description. What lets them respond quickly — and what turns months of back-and-forth into a single exchange — is a file containing the diagnosis, recent results, blood groups, and documentation of the donor relationship where there is a donor.
Why the order matters
Families often make first contact with a description of the illness and a question about cost. That is the natural place to start and the least useful one: neither can be answered without the file, so the reply is a request for the file, and weeks pass.
Gathering the documents first inverts that. It also has a second effect worth naming — the process of collecting them usually reveals which questions your own treating team has not yet been asked.
The medical file
From the clinician currently treating the patient, in writing.
- The diagnosis, and how long it has been established
- Current treatment, including dialysis details where relevant
- Recent laboratory results, particularly organ function
- Imaging reports, and the images themselves where they can be shared
- Other conditions being treated, and current medication
- Any previous transplant, and what happened
Where there is a living donor
A donor is assessed independently, but the file that opens the conversation still needs the basics.
- Blood group for both patient and prospective donor
- Tissue typing or HLA results where these already exist
- The donor’s own medical history and current conditions
- Documentation of the relationship between donor and patient
Translation is usually needed, and usually underestimated
Most centres require documents in a language their team reads, and many require certified translation for anything a regulator will see. It is worth asking which documents need certification before paying to translate all of them.
Sources
No sources have been attached to this page yet. Sources are recorded in the evidence registry with their publication and verification dates.
This article describes a process rather than making clinical claims; requirements vary by centre and by country.
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