People wanting liver or pancreas transplants from Shands at UF will now need a Plan B.
Due to a shortage of surgeons, those transplant programs were temporarily inactivated Friday, said Dr. Kevin Behrns, chairman of the UF College of Medicine's department of surgery.
By Monday, UF and Shands employees had notified almost everyone on the waiting list for those transplants.
Officials needed to contact 125 pancreas and liver patients about the program's status change, according to a Shands press release.
Sixty-eight of those people are actively listed on the transplant waiting lists for the United Network for Organ Sharing, a nonprofit federal government contractor that works with transplant and organ procurement centers throughout the nation.
Fifty-seven more people are currently undergoing evaluation for a transplant.
Shands transplant teams are helping patients who need to be reassigned to area centers for ongoing medical care.
UNOS offers guidelines for centers like Shands at UF that have to temporarily inactivate transplant programs.
UF and Shands officials are working with the nonprofit organization as well as with peer programs to support its patients during the transition.
The closest transplant centers are Tampa General Hospital, the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville and Florida Hospital in Orlando.
While the program is inactive, officials will focus on recruiting new employees to work on the pancreas and liver transplant teams.
The teams need additional staff to operate at full strength, Behrns said.
Once new personnel have been hired, Shands plans to resume the liver and pancreas programs.
Patients won't lose their positions on the Shands at UF transplant lists, Behrns said.
"They will maintain their current position on the UF list," he said. "If we reopen the program in a short period of time, they would not lose any ground."
To receive transplants, patients must first be evaluated and deemed eligible for one. Then their information is entered into the UNOS system, which runs match tests when an organ donor dies and their organs are made available for transplantation, said Anne Paschke, UNOS spokeswoman.
People compatible with the donor's organ - a determination that can depend on blood type and other factors - are then placed on a ranked list that is ordered according to the program's policies.
In 2007, the median amount of time a patient waited for a liver transplant was 319 days. Those in need of only a pancreas transplant had a median wait time of 260 days that year, according to an annual report on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website.
The heart, lung and kidney transplant teams are still in operation at Shands at UF.
