ODT Hub Programme

An introduction to the Organ Donation and Transplantation Hub Programme

The NHS Blood & Transplant Strategy Taking Organ Transplantation to 2020 gave a commitment to significantly increase numbers of organ donors and transplants. To meet the requirements of this strategy, we needed to strengthen and develop our processes and systems, and this is what the Organ Donation and Transplantation Hub Programme set out to achieve.

Our vision is:

To provide a simpler, safer, responsive service that supports clinicians in matching world class performance in organ donation and transplantation, with a clinically led 24/7 support centre at its core and renewed technology as its foundation.

Over a period of five years the ODT Hub Programme has successfully transformed and enhanced existing donation transplantation processes, as well as introducing several new initiatives.

The latter part of 2019 saw the programme team immersed in designing and running several strategy workshops around the UK to identify and assess what the country feels we should be focussing on during the next 5 to 10 years.

Nearly 500 people attended these strategy days, giving us over 4,000 valuable and important ideas, questions and suggestions to consider. Everyone who took part demonstrated a huge amount of passion and commitment and the quality of discussion and outputs generated was tremendous.

The process of writing the strategy itself is well underway and a period of consultation and review will follow. We are on target to publish the final version during Spring 2020.

Highlights of the ODT Hub Programme

The ODT Hub Programme

Find out more

Supporting specialist nurses

Find out more

Digitisation of the HTA A and B forms

Find out more

National Liver Offering Scheme

Find out more

National Pancreas Offering Scheme

Find out more

National Kidney Offering Scheme

Find out more

The ODT Hub programme so far

2019

The roll out of the first digitised HTA form – the B form, with plans to digitise the more complex A forms during 2020. The new digital form enables more consistently accurate and timely collation of information that can be shared with transplant surgeons. This will support increased organ utilisation whilst minimising cold ischaemia.
The introduction of an improved Kidney Matching Scheme and Pancreas Matching Scheme. The aim of these enhanced schemes will ensure organs are allocated to recipients who will receive the most benefit from a transplant. This will include amendments to the Transplant List which will capture any additional recipient data.
Work continued behind the scenes to improve our IT systems and processes, introducing our own Management tool. This will enable our different processes and schemes to ‘talk to each other’ and become more interactive. These improvements will enable our teams to handle the increased number of donors that our successful Marketing Campaigns generate.

2018

The launch of the new 03000 UK Donor Referral number to all Transplant Centres and Hospitals. All these calls are now handled by ODT Hub Operations.
The launch of the new National Liver Offering Scheme. This updated scheme matches livers on a national, rather than a regional, basis and will help to place the organ with the patient most likely to benefit from a transplant.
The Donor Referral and Assessment (DRA) module to DonorPath went live – an application used by our Specialist Nurses. The DRA module provides decision making support for Specialist Nurses – Organ Donation (SN-ODs) at the time of a potential organ donor referral and ensures consistency of referral management, regardless of where in the UK a referral is made from. Use of the new module will ensure that referring hospitals receive the fastest possible response; preventing unnecessary delays to them in the provision of end-of-life care. The module will also provide valuable data about the referral process, which is vital to the work we are undertaking within ODT to shorten the length of the organ donation process.

2017

The ODT Hub was officially launched and ODT Hub Operations began undertaking all cardiothoracic offering from donors after brain death (DBD) and lungs from donors after cardiac death (DCD).
New Heart and Lung Offering Schemes were safely implemented using improved IT systems. This involved developing technology platforms to ensure that donated organs are safely matched to the most suitable recipients. This is helping to save and improve lives by ensuring the recipients in greatest need, and for whom a transplant will give the greatest benefit, are given priority and are offered an organ.
The Super Urgent Liver List was rolled out, allowing Transplant Coordinators to see (in a range of locations and on a range of devices) how many patients nationally are super-urgently listed for a liver which in turn helps them with planning.
The design of an improved Transplant List began – including improvements and the gradual replacement of ODT Online. These changes made things simpler and meant fewer phone calls.

If you have any questions, please email programme.odthub@nhsbt.nhs.uk