Organ donation quality control in Abruzzo region (Italy)

Abruzzo is a region in central Italy with a population of 1,262,392. Within this region there are 13 hospitals with intensive care units, four of which have neurosurgical units. The Regional Centre for Transplants in L'Aquila is notified of encephalic deaths in hospitals in Abruzzo and Molise and coordinates organ retrieval and transplantation. Organ donation is a process that involves a whole series of professionals who, operating in a sequential manner in each hospital, make possible the use of a cadaveric organ to give life to a person or improve the quality of life of a patient on a waiting list. Quality control procedures were introduced in 2001 and involve all of the hospitals in the region with intensive care units. The system for quality control was computerized in 2004 and is used in the four hospitals with neurosurgical units (type A hospitals) and in the 13 hospitals without (type B hospitals); the different types of deaths (cause of death, age, etc) are also analyzed with this system. One of the aims of this system is to discover the theoretical donation capacity, taking as benchmark values those resulting from the regional average and those published in international literature, and noting any shortcomings. It has emerged that donor identification is well organized and efficient and this is thanks to a concerted effort that has been made to overcome technical and organizational problems connected to donor detection and donor maintenance during the 6 hours of legal observation. The high percentage of opposition to organ removal, despite the fall registered in the first half of this year (2005), is still above the national average and still remains a critical point in the organ donation process.