The allocation agency Eurotransplant is based in Leiden, the Netherlands, and coordinates the international exchange of donor organs across a region with 124 million inhabitants. Transplantation centres and tissue typing laboratories as well as hospitals with intensive care units in Belgium, Germany, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Austria, Croatia, and Slovenia take a share in this international co-operation. Acting as mediator between donors and recipients, Eurotransplant plays a key role in receiving and allocating donor organs for transplantation. On the one hand, Eurotransplant stores data of all potential recipients – such as blood group, tissue type (HLA groups), cause of illness, and urgency – in a central database and includes the patients on a waiting list. On the other hand, Eurotransplant is being informed as soon as organs from a deceased donor become available anywhere in the Eurotransplant catchment area. The regional tissue typing laboratory determines the donor’s blood group and tissue characteristics in order to find a suitable recipient.
Following a computer-assisted selection procedure Eurotransplant immediately communicates the relevant medical donor information to the doctors at the respective recipient’s transplantation hospital. The doctors then decide whether they accept or refuse the donor organ in question. If the organ is accepted, the attending physician will inform the selected recipient without delay. If there is no suitable recipient within the Eurotransplant region, Eurotransplant will contact one of its sister organisations, e.g. UK Transplant or Scandiatransplant. As a general rule, the entire process from removal of the donor organ until transplantation must not exceed a few hours.