Organ Recovery Manager, Center for Organ Recovery & Education

My name is Laura Cwynar and I am the Organ Recovery Manager for the Center for Organ Recovery and Education in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We basically service as the link between the donor family and the recipients. So what will happen is if there's any end of life conversation at the hospital by a family, the hospital will call into our organization and we'll dispatch a coordinator to go onsite at the hospital. They do a chart review, they huddle with the nursing staff to find out what the family's thinking, is there gonna be a change, of plan in care, and how we could best support them? If a family were to make the decision to take their loved one towards comfort measures and take them off of a ventilator. If a family decides to donate the next role would be donor management. That's when we start getting the organs of the individual that's donating to work and function as best as they can prior to locating recipients. And then the last role would be going to the OR with the donor and working with the transplant surgeons to perfuse and package the organs and make sure they're going where they need to be for the recipients. I was an organ procurement coordinator for about 12 years. During that time, I also did service as a hospital development liaison where I worked specifically with a group of hospitals in Erie Pennsylvania through the donation process and any education needs they had regarding donation. And most recently, the last two and a half years I've been the supervisor over the coordinators that get to travel with the transplant surgeons, work with them directly in the OR and profuse the organs and package them. There is a processor that we work with in combination to recover bone marrow. So we have trained some of my coordinators to recover portions of the spine and once they do that, that is sent to the processor where they extract the bone marrow. And what they're doing on their end is what's really exciting. They're using it to treat autoimmune diseases. Some of the transplant recipients after they receive their gift of donation they're also using it to treat some HIV patients and it's basically looking at stem cells. So I feel like that's really rewarding for my team to know they're having such an impact on something in the medical field that's growing right now. For the hours in general in our field they tend to be on call, whether they're a combination of 12 hour or 24 hour shifts. So you have to be able to be flexible and have a good support system at home because there are times, you know you might be away from your family working on a holiday but I think it's to know that someone else one day is gonna be able to be out of the hospital and at home with theirs.