Hello and welcome back to Ackrack. I'm Jed Walpaw and we've got a great show for you today.

I'm really excited to have two fantastic people who are doing really interesting work with me to

talk about an incredibly important topic and that is organ donation. This is something that is

important in so many ways but especially for anesthesiologists since we're involved within the ICU

and in the OR in organ donation in a lot of different aspects and so we're going to learn about

that today. I've got with me Dr. Emily Vale who's an assistant professor of anesthesiology and

critical care at University of Pennsylvania and she's also the co-director of the Penn Center for

Perioperative Outcomes Research and Transformation and also Dr. Varune Goyle who is an associate professor

and the co-medical director at the Center for Life and at that is at the UT Health Center in

San Antonio, Texas. Both of you really excited to have you welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you.

So Emily let's start with you and just let's talk about some of the background the very basics

of organ donation. What are we talking about? What organs? What's the process? What do you think people

need to know as kind of the basics here? Thanks Jed. So to start as anesthesiologist as you pointed

out we have a lot of contact with transplant patients both in the ICU and the OR and important

to know that we participate in a very large system of both donors and transplant recipients.

In the US, as of yesterday, January 31st of 2023, there were more than 100,000 patients on

waiting lists for solid organs in the US. That's everything from kidneys, livers, lungs, heart,

pancreas, small bowel and something called vascular composite aligraf, which is hand,

uterus and face. Unfortunately, many patients will lose eligibility for transplant either because

of medical reasons or because they'll pass away before an organ, suitable organ can be available

to them. And so the system is set up for us to try to get as many suitable organs for as many

potential recipients to really mitigate this national organ shortage, which is something that

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