Candy Wells is currently the Director of Organ Utilization at LifeCenter Northwest, overseeing organ allocation, surgical recovery and kidney perfusion, along with transplant center collaboration and utilization initiatives. Candy joined LifeCenter Northwest as a consultant in late 2011 and was promoted to Director in early 2012. Prior to joining LifeCenter, Candy worked in tissue donation and transplantation for 12 years as Surgical Donation Consultant for MTF, and Manager of Donation Services for the Northwest Tissue Center. She started her career in organ donation at LifeCenter Northwest in the 1990s and is privileged to be back. Candy has a Bachelor’s degree in nursing and a Masters in Organizational Management.
Increasing Liver Utilization Using Hard to Place Livers
The Alliance Conversation Series brings you cost-free, fast-paced collaborative opportunities that highlight successful donation and transplantation practices across the country. Through shared insight, multidisciplinary experts identify solutions to critical challenges affecting the community of practice and actively share them for open discussion and broader knowledge of effective practices.
The Alliance is not an advocacy organization and always intends to maintain an objective and unbiased perspective.
Sessions are designed to be approximately 30-45 minutes in length and encourage real-time feedback and participation from viewers.
Overview: The liver transplant community is continually challenged by a lack of donor livers to adequately meet the needs of transplant candidates. Recently, there has been a rapid increase in the number of liver donors with suboptimal donor criteria, particularly DCD donors. These “hard to place livers “present a challenge to both OPOs and transplant centers for different reasons. The advent of liver perfusion represents a potential opportunity to increase utilization of “hard to place livers” but limitations of these technologies must also be acknowledged.