As well as offering specialist services for heart and lung transplantation, the multidisciplinary Transplant team at Royal Papworth also provides the following additional services:
Bridge to transplant surgery (BTT)
Allied to its expertise in transplantation, Royal Papworth Hospital is one of six hospitals in the UK designated for BTT surgery. This involves implantation of mechanical blood pumps termed Ventricular Assist Devices (VAD). These devices support the heart's pumping function in severe heart failure patients while they await transplantation.
Grown-up congenital heart conditions (GUCH)
The Transplant directorate is also a regional centre for patients with grown-up congenital heart conditions (GUCH), providing treatment optimisation for patients referred on from other hospitals or primary care physicians in the East of England.
Pioneering research
In March 2015, doctors at Royal Papworth Hospital were the first in Europe to successfully perform a transplant using a non-beating heart from a circulatory determined dead (DCD) donor. Up until then surgeons were only able to transplant beating hearts from donors following the diagnosis of brain death (DBD).
The heart transplant rate at the hospital has increased by more than a third since the DCD programme was launched, and the results are comparable to the current standard of hearts transplanted from brain dead donors.
Transplant database
In order to monitor our work through audit and to aid transplant research, a wide range of clinical information is collected about each patient referred, assessed or transplanted and held on our transplant database. Information from this database is transmitted securely to NHSBT for monitoring purposes, and to the International Society of Heart & Lung Transplant for worldwide bench marking.
The Royal Papworth transplant team is represented at and contributes to national and international forums and research.