WI Life magazine, issue : Feb 2016Topic; Organ donationFAO Kaye McIntoshBox: Speke – 2nd versionWord count 405

Thousands of people’s lives are transformed every year through tissue donations processed by Europe’s largest tissue bank.

The Tissue Centre in Speke, just East of Liverpool, is the UK’s only multi-tissue bank. This is where donated skin, heart valves, bones, tendon and cartilage go to be checked and stored.

Most families who agree to donate their loved ones’ organs, also agree to tissue donation, in which case tissue donation follows the organ donation pathway, and consent is done in person. But most deaths can’t be considered for organ donation. In these cases, families give their consent over the phone rather than in person.

Speke has links to hospitals, coroners’ offices and police stations from across the UK, alerting them to a possible new tissue donor. Then Speke’s team of 13 specialist nurses calls families over the phone to request consent for tissue donation. The heat is one to retrieve and store the tissues, often within 24 hours.

Sometimes the nurses are looking for tissues in response to an accident or other disaster, and sometimes they want to help a particular patient – for example a sick child needing a bone of a certain size. The 7/7 terrorist attacks in London used up most of Speke’s skin stocks, but a surge in donations soon replenished stocks.

The centre also handles living donations. The specialist nurses ask patients undergoing certain types of surgery if their tissues can be reused instead of going to waste. Hip replacements are a source of bone that can be used as cement for future hip ops, or to help repair big areas of lost bone. In 2013 some 3,000 femur heads collected from hip-op patients were donated to other hip-op patients. Within 5 years, bone growth from such natural cement will be indistinguishable from the patient’s own bone. Donations from women undergoing elective caesarean sections can also be used as corneal grafts in eye operations.

All newly donated tissues are screened to ensure they are safe to use. Verifying the test results independently can take up to three months. Meanwhile the tissues are stored in Speke. Some tissues – such as skin and heart valves – must be processed for use and stored in liquid nitrogen awaiting verification. Once the tissue passes the safety checks, it’s checked again, processed and frozen. When hospitals request a particular tissue, Speke retrieves it from the stores and sends it out.