With consent, hospital staff shifts focus from saving one person to helping six to eight others
A rider of an all-terrain vehicle has an accident in Green Ridge State Forest.
A young girl on a cross-country training run is struck by a car in Frostburg.
Sirens wail. Sometimes a helicopter is launched. Victims are transported to a Cumberland hospital.
On some of these occasions, the medical news is grim. The injured person will not survive.
But their organs — heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, small intestine, pancreas — often can be recovered and transplanted, giving life to others.
“We can go along not having any potential organ donors for six months and then we get three in a week,” said Chuck Barrick, trauma nurse coordinator at the Western Maryland Regional Medical Center.
The Cumberland hospital’s distance from Maryland’s two Baltimore transplant centers — University of Maryland Medical Center and Johns Hopkins Hospital — does not preclude donations.
Donations are coordinated by the Living Legacy Foundation in Baltimore, for which Jennifer Gelman is the director of professional education.
“Once the people at Western Maryland Regional Medical Center have identified a person as a potential donor, we send someone to Cumberland to assess the situation,” Gelman said.
The victim must be brain dead and on a ventilator to qualify as a donor.
If a donation is deemed to be workable, a second person from the foundation, one trained in dealing with family crisis, is dispatched to Cumberland to speak with the victim’s family.
“If the person has already chosen to be a donor, we inform the family. If not, we ask for the opportunity for a donation.”
Throughout Maryland, consent has been given by 58 percent of the families. Hispanic families have agreed at a rate of 75 percent, Caucasian 64 percent, African-American 55 percent and Asian 33 percent.
“You have to realize that this is a terrible time for families and for (hospital) staff,” Barrick explained. “We have come to the realization that we can no longer save one person, so we shift the focus to saving six to eight other people by way of organ donations.
“We never stop fighting to save a patient until we make the declaration of brain death,” Barrick added.
Once that happens, and once a recipient has been identified, surgeons head west from Baltimore, arrive at WMRMC and recover the appropriate organs.
“We used to always transport them by helicopter, but more often they go by ground now,” Barrick said.
Air transportation is more likely for a heart or lungs, according to Gelman, who said the transplant for those organs must take place within four to six hours.
Since 2008 there have been 12 donors whose organs have been recovered at Cumberland hospitals. Gelman said organs could be recovered from victims at Garrett Memorial Hospital, but appropriate conditions have not yet arisen there.
In 2010, Maryland transplant centers performed 476 transplants from deceased donors and 153 from living donors.
There are times, according to Gelman, when portions of a donor’s liver can be used to save two recipients.
With rare exception, organs recovered in Maryland go to Maryland recipients, Gelman said.
People can express a willingness to be an organ donor at www.donatelifemaryland.org or www.mva.maryland.gov.
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