Almost every day we hear about human organ trafficking in other countries.  Here, in the US, we have several state and federal laws that regulate this business but we have one in particular whose sole mission is to regulate the organs allocations.

United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) is the private, non-profit organization that manages the nation’s organ transplant system under contract with the federal government.  Basically one of UNOS responsibilities is to make sure that organ transplantation is as safe as it can be by setting a national standard with rules that every single transplant center in this country must follow.  UNOS will survey every program every three years with a very comprehensive examination of practices and to make sure everybody follows the rules and its policies.  Trust me, when UNOS is in the house, people are nervous!  We just went through that at our center and a lot of people were anxious.  It is almost like the representatives are God!  As a matter of fact, they almost are because they have the power to shut a transplant program down.  They will go through charts after charts to make sure every single detail is present.  They mainly want to make sure that patients make an informed decision when signing in for transplant.

UNOS uses a portal named UNet that manages the wait list and organ offers from anywhere in the country.  This is the tool used to connect every transplant centers and organ procurement organization like LifeGift in Texas or OneLegacy in Los Angeles, Ca.  Offers can be sent from anywhere in the US, even Porto Rico and Hawaii!  Someone that lives in New York would not get a heart from California but could certainly get a kidney from Hawaii as the time an organ can spend outside a body varies.  But this is something I want to talk in a future blog.