[The first five years of Hungary's Eurotransplant membership]

The author concludes lessons learned from Hungary joining Eurotransplant five years ago through the more than half a century history of the Hungarian organ transplantation. The result of the stepwise evolution is that today's transplantation activity can be measured by a European benchmark. In comparison to the era before the membership, there are 40% more transplantations in the country. First the numbers of the living donor kidney transplantations significantly raised, followed by the organs transplanted from brain-dead donors: kidney, heart, pancreas, then liver and finally also lung. The ratio of the multiorgan donors changed from about 40% to more than 70%. A reassuring solution was found for the high urgent cases, for the paediatric transplants and for the highly immunized patients, who would have been in a desperate situation without Eurotransplant, but now every Hungarian end-stage organ failure patient has similar chances for getting a potential life-saving organ as their former luckier West-European counterparts. Orv Hetil. 2018; 159(42): 1695-1699.