Phyllis Cunningham: transplant co-ordinator based at Beaumont Hospital - the first person to fill such a role in the Republic.
The transplant co-ordination centre first opened in 1986 to deal with kidney transplants - there were no other types of transplants then. Having a background in renal nursing, I became the first co-ordinator and did the job on my own for seven years. Now there are three of us, and while it is still short-staffed, we are able to rotate a week on-call every three weeks.
My job is to look after the organ procurement service for the State. There are 39 donating hospitals and I deal with any query about organ donation and follow it from initial notification about a donor right through until the organs are transplanted. That usually involves about 24 hours on call, sometimes more. When I get a call about a donor, I become absolutely focused on that task.
There's no high science in it. It's all about communication, being practical and logical and thinking quickly and sensitivity, of course, because the needs of the donor family take priority.
Typically, you would get a call from an intensive care unit to talk about somebody who has died and the family is considering organ donation. I explain what is involved and the various tests that need to be done. I call the transplant centres to identify suitably matched recipients. I am attached to the renal transplant team in Beaumont and I also liase with St Vincent's liver transplant team, the Mater/Vincent's heart team and the tissue banks. If there are no suitable recipients here, I deal with British transplant centres.
After brain stem cell tests confirm a person's death, that person is maintained on a life-support machine for the purpose of donation. The ICU staff have to care for that patient and their family. They're dealing with a very traumatic situation - a patients of theirs has died, maybe a young person who went out to work that morning and never came home because they had a brain haemorrhage or a traffic accident.
The transplant co-ordinator is the key person in the entire process and I arrange a theatre time and the transportation of the various transplant teams to the donor hospital. Then the difficult thing is to meet the donor family - you want to ensure that they are happy with their decision and that they have no concerns.
I travel with the Beaumont transplant team and I stay in theatre during the organ retrieval to provide support for everybody and to help the relative. I always help to lay out the body afterwards because I feel it is important to give the person dignity.
When we return to Beaumont, the tissue typist contacts me with the names of potential recipients. I ring the transplant surgeon on call and we'll go through the recipient selection and then I get the "nice" job of ringing the patient.
If there are no donors on a particular day, my hours are 9am to 5pm. On those days, I'm busy co-ordinating all of the patients on the waiting list for kidney and pancreas transplants.
I'm 18 years doing it but it's quite emotional when one of your patients gets a transplant. This is the call that they've being waiting on all their lives and they think it'll never come. But it's not until they get the phone call that it dawns on them that somebody else has died and it's very emotional for them.
I have never met an unpleasant donor family - they're the most beautiful people - the people who make this decision are special people.
- Interview by Niamh Kavanagh