VCU Medical Center to host a celebration for transplant donors and patients

By Michael Ford
University News Services

WHAT:            Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center’s Hume-Lee Transplant Program is hosting a celebration for patients and caregivers to highlight organ donation and transplantation.

                        In the 1960s MCV Hospitals, now the VCU Medical Center, established one of the first human organ transplant centers in the country. Early groundbreaking work was done at VCU by transplantation pioneer Dr. David Hume, the program’s first chairman. Additional technical advances were refined under the leadership of Dr. H.M. Lee. VCU continues as a world transplant leader, including work by the center’s current chair, Dr. Marc Posner, who led a VCU team that performed the nation’s first living, right-lobe, unrelated liver transplantation from a wife to a husband. In 2001, U.S. News & World Report recognized the Hume-Lee Transplant program as the second busiest living-donor liver transplant program in the United States.

The VCU Medical Center’s clinical transplant program focuses on livers, kidneys and the pancreas. About 500 surgical procedures are performed on transplant and dialysis patients each year.

Each year, nearly 80,000 people in the United States await a life-saving organ transplant.

WHEN:            Aug. 26, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

WHERE:         5701 Huntsman Rd., Virginia Aviation Museum,
                         Richmond International Airport.

WHO:               ·         Marc P. Posner, M.D., chairman, Division of
      Transplantation Surgery and director of the
      Hume-Lee Transplant Center
·         Donna B. George, R.N., M.S., administrator and
      nursing director of the Hume-Lee Transplant
      Center
·         Transplant donors
·         Transplant recipients