Jewish Hospital to hold organ donation drive, Kentucky

Darla Carter  | The Courier-Journal

Jewish Hospital will be recruiting organ donors Tuesday during an event to celebrate National Donate Life Month.

The organ donation drive will be from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the hospital’s Chestnut Street lobby. Donor families and recipients will be available to answer questions, and the public can register to become organ donors.

Though donations from deceased donors continue to be important, the hospital also wants to raise awareness about the need for living donors, said Barbara Mackovic, a spokeswoman for Jewish, which has a nationally recognized transplant center in partnership with the University of Louisville School of Medicine.

Living donors are good Samaritans who are willing to give up all or part of an organ for someone in need.

“While we perform many ‘living donor’ kidney transplants where a person will donate one of their kidneys to a loved one, friend or complete stranger, there are not enough of these to meet the need,” Dr. Michael Marvin, chief of transplantation at Jewish Hospital and UofL, said in a news release. “It is only through a combination of living and deceased donors that we can hope to reduce the number of patients waiting for life-saving organs.”

For more information about organ donation, go towww.donatelifeky.org, where you can sign up to join the Kentucky Organ Donor Registry.