History
History of Eurotransplant
Prof. Dr. Jon J. van Rood founded Eurotransplant in 1967 to allow for a central registration of all patients who were waiting for a donor organ; the aim was and is to increase the chance of finding a good match between the donors and the recipients tissue groups. In doing so, the transplant results themselves would improve considerably, according to Van Rood. One of Eurotransplants most important tasks, therefore, is the registration of patients who qualify for a transplant operation. At the moment the more than 75 transplant hospitals participating in Eurotransplant have a joint waiting list of approximately 15,000 patients. Originally, Eurotransplant's activities only concerned kidney transplants, but in the late seventies it also came to mediate for liver transplants. A few years later, heart, lung and pancreas transplants followed. Recently, patients qualifying for an intestine transplant operation have also joined the international waiting list.
