Transplantation Medicine and Organ Donation in Germany: The Medical, Legal, Organizational and Ethical Frameworks

Beside the fascination in the feasibility and the remarkable advances in the impressive development of transplantation medicine, it is beset with a considerable issues and concerns which still remain to be addressed to in a meaningful context: equity in organ allocation, the contradiction between a high acceptance of organ donation in the German society according to surveys and the low willingness to give consent, and deficit in reporting possible organ donors from the hospital.

With informed consent as a useful legal frame, this likewise impels the next of kin to make a decision for or against organ donation during the grueling moments at the bedside of their beloved moribund relative. What layouts in the healthcare system as well as in legal and ethical structures can promote or obviate organ donation as an indispensable essential for a transplantation? Is xenotransplantation a hopeful alternative to human organ transplantation?

With remarkable accuracy and elaborate knowledge, this book offers an interesting and absorbing yet provocative evidence-based avenue, of expounding into these questions. Although based on German experience, it will provide a valuable and updated governance to all those who, even in other countries, for private or professional interests, want to be informed and comprehensively reckon with the diverse medical, ethical, organizational, political and economic facets of an extraordinary field of medicine.

This is an open access book.

Eva Maria Javier Delmo is a specialist in Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery with subspecialization in Pediatric Heart and Congenital Heart Surgery. She has trained in Hospital Universitari de Bellvitge, Charité- Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Deutsches Herzentrum Berlin and Children’s Hospital Boston -Harvard Medical School. Presently, she works with the Charité Research Organization- Charité- Universitätsmedizin Berlin. In August 2020, she obtained a degree of Masters of Business Administration - focused on International Health Care Management at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences. She published more than 70 research papers, mostly as first author and co-authored chapters in several cardio-surgical books. She is a reviewer of 26 prestigious medical and surgical journals and is a member of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, European Association of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgeons, European society of Cardiology, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Herz-, Thorax-, und Gefäßchirurgie, Women in Thoracic Surgery, World Society of Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery and she is the Executive Managing Director of the Roland Hetzer International Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery Society Foundation. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the newly-launched journal, The Heart Matrix.

Roland Hetzer is a world-renowned cardiothoracic and vascular surgeon and the founder of Deutsches Herzzentrum Berlin, where he served as the Medical Director and Chief of the Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular surgery from 1985 to 2014. From1998-2017, he served as the Medical Director of the Heart Center Cottbus.He performed the first heart transplantation in 1983 after resumption of transplant moratorium and the first pediatric heart transplantation in Germany in 1985. Likewise, he implanted the first ventricular assist device in children in Germany in 1987, which became the impetus for him to initiate the establishment of the company Berlin Heart in 1988. Aside from his numerous original contributions in cardiothoracic and vascular surgery, especially in surgery of heart valves and congenital heart diseases, he had pioneered the introduction, development and clinical application of total artificial heart (TAH) and ventricular assist devices (VAD), in adults and in children, since 1987. He had the largest number of single-center VAD/TAH implantations (n=2361) worldwide. He published more than 1100 scientific papers and authored and co-authored numerous books and book chapters. He was awarded the Berlin Order of Merit (1987) and First Class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (1995). He was also awarded multiple honorary doctorates (7). Since 2015, he continues doing his private practice in Cardiovascular Surgery at the Cardio Centrum Berlin and at the Die Herzspezialisten in Kurfürstendamm.