Quality and safety of organ transplantation.

Transplantation, like all medical procedures, carries potential risks for both donors, recipients and health care personnel. Living donation and associated morbidity and mortality are documented in living donor registries which, run nationally, are a step toward long-term quality control in organ transplantation. Such quality control and management should however be a part of all stages of the transplantation process, beginning with donor identification and ending with long-term follow up of transplant recipients. A whole range of transplantation-related events would be controlled, including organ procurement, handling, risk of disease/malignancy transmission, recipient operation and follow up. Several international bodies and institutions have formulated statements addressing these issues. The essential ideas of these documents are focused on protection of human integrity, avoidance of bodily harm and coercion, exclusion of commercialism, equitable access to transplantation, fairness of allocation, transparency of the allocation criteria/procedures, competence requirements of the staff and quality management.