George Mazariegos

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 sessions encourage real-time feedback and participation from viewers.

Overview: Children, especially those under 5 years of age, have the highest death rate on the transplant waiting list compared to any other age range. Countries like UK and Australia have been able to almost eliminate waitlist death of children through a combination of centralization of liver transplant services and an intention to split policy. In the US, despite the organ donation rates per million population exceeding that of the UK or Australia, deaths on the waiting list remains high. Pediatric liver transplantation waitlist mortality is a solvable problem, with the solution likely reachable by multiple pathways. An analysis led by University of Pittsburgh and collaborators from the Starzl Network for Excellence in Pediatric Transplantation (www.starzlnetwork.org) suggests that greater use of partial liver transplants, either from a living donor or by splitting a deceased donor’s liver for two recipients, could save many of these young lives.

In this session, we will explore successful Australian pediatric liver transplant policy and practices and discuss opportunities for improvement in the US to achieving zero wait list mortality with ideal outcomes