When minutes matter

A look at the intersecting challenges in organ transportation, and a call for government and industry leaders to join the donation and transplant community in finding national-level solutions that ensure donor organs get safely to patients in need.

In late December 2022, as severe storms swept across the Midwest, a husband and father waited in a North Dakota hospital for a kidney. A lifesaving donor organ had been matched and was ready to be received by his transplant team—but 400 miles separated kidney from recipient, and a blizzard had cancelled all flights. Ultimately, thanks to a determined courier, a tow truck, a sheriff’s deputy whose own sister was a liver transplant recipient, and a snowplow clearing the way on a highway closed by driving snow and 50 mph winds, that gift of life was successfully delivered to its destination. Read more on UNOS.org.