Transforming transplant: Detroit partnerships help hospitals sustain high-quality programsPosted by Elizabeth Shaw | The Flint Journal April 25, 2008 13:24PM
FLINT -- Let her eat cake.
Shelley Ann Chapman of Flint hasn't heard those words in 22 years. But she had a nice big piece with chocolate icing this week, thanks to her kidney and pancreas transplants March 11 at Henry Ford Hospital's Transplant Institute in Detroit.
She's the second patient to benefit from Hurley Medical Center's new transplant partnership with Ford.
"I feel really normal for the first time in I don't know how long," said Chapman, 34, a single mom who was a severe diabetic and on dialysis for kidney failure before the surgery. "My 8-year-old son told me yesterday how glad he is that I'm not sick anymore. He's had a rough go of it with me in and out of the hospital all the time."
Genesys Regional Medical Center offers a similar kidney transplant partnership with St. John Hospital and Medical Center in Detroit.
In both cases, transplants are now performed at the Detroit facilities, with the local hospitals providing pre- and post-operative care.
It's part of a growing trend in regional organ transplant services.
"The transplant process itself is getting more complex and sophisticated and it needs a lot of resources to maintain a high-quality program," said Dr. Sayed Osama, Hurley's chief of nephrology, or kidney treatment. "It's much more than what we could put together here because we were so small, doing 25-27 transplants a year as opposed to a center like Ford that does 200-250 transplants.
"Because of that volume, they can sustain a specialty transplant team that includes all the necessary clinical and administrative expertise, from pharmacists and surgeons to social workers and administrators who can run the whole program efficiently."
Kidney transplant patients at Genesys and Hurley now benefit from state-of-the-art resources at major transplant facilities, without the need to leave town for the extensive medical testing and lifelong follow-up care that a transplant requires.
"What this partnership does is it brings on-site everything which Ford has, right into Hurley," said Osama. "All this we've been able to retain within the community so the patient doesn't have to drive 50 miles for each visit, maybe several times a week.
"I've known too many patients who could not be listed for organ transplant simply because they didn't have the resources or ability to organize all those appointments far away."
In Chapman's case, severe diabetes had caused a host of health problems since age 12, eventually causing kidney failure requiring home dialysis.
Three times a day, she had to drop whatever she was doing to go home, seal herself into a sterile room and spend an hour or more flushing the toxins from her body.
"It was very hard to do anything or go anywhere because you have to keep everything sanitary during dialysis. In an emergency I could do it in my car, but it's not worth the risk of infection. So there were no vacations, nothing," said Chapman, who works as an aide at her son's school.
She's now off dialysis with a healthy, functioning kidney, and no longer diabetic thanks to a healthy new pancreas. But the transplants might not have been feasible if she'd had to leave town for everything, she said.
"They just lowered my follow-up visits to twice a week and for the rest of my life I'll have to be checked pretty regularly. I take 22 pills in the morning right now. But I don't have to go back to Ford for any of it," said Chapman.
She's looking forward to a different kind of travel now.
"I'm hoping this summer to take my son somewhere, even if it's just to the water park in Frankenmuth," she said. "We haven't done anything in so long."
http://www.mlive.com/flintjournal/index.ssf/2008/04/transforming_transplant_detroi.html
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