About the Transplant Center
If your child suffers from a chronic disease that will lead to organ failure, solid organ transplant is today’s treatment of choice.
Children’s Transplant Center offers comprehensive evaluation and care to patients with end-stage diseases of the heart, liver, kidneys and intestine who may need an organ transplant. We treat every patient and family member with care, compassion and respect.
We are committed to providing optimal growth and quality of life for your child—and helping your entire family return to a normal, active life.
During this very challenging time, your child will receive some of the best pediatric medical care available in the United States. In addition, we will help your entire family to learn new coping skills and to better understand the transplant process. Our transplant specialists are here to help you with insurance matters and financial counseling.
And all along the way—before, during and after surgery—you and your child will work with the same team of skilled transplant specialists.
Why Children’s?
Children’s has been a consistent leader among national pediatric transplant centers. The outcomes of our liver, heart and kidney transplant programs are among the best in the nation. Our intestine transplant program is the only one of its kind in the Pacific Northwest.
Our Transplant Center has recruited top transplant specialists and continues to add innovative programs.
Children’s is the only provider of liver transplants in the region. Our liver transplant team is led by Dr. Patrick Healey, Children’s division chief of Transplantation. Dr. Healey is one of the few pediatric transplant surgeons with expertise in both transplant and pediatric surgery. He has performed more than 100 liver transplantations on children.
Dr. Jorge Reyes, director of Transplant Services at Children’s, is one of the most experienced pediatric liver transplant surgeons in the United States. He has performed 200 multi-organ transplantations and over 1,000 liver transplantations. Dr. Reyes is also one of the few surgeons in the world who performs living donor liver transplants.
Our heart transplant team is led by Dr. Gordon Cohen and Dr. Yuk Law.
A pioneer in his field, Dr. Cohen is the one of the first surgeons in the country to successfully perform a transplantation when the infant patient and donor heart had mismatched blood types. Dr. Cohen also made heart transplant history by moving another child—at 12 days old, the youngest patient to receive a heart transplant in the Pacific Northwest—from a heart-lung bypass machine to transplant.
We are one of the top five kidney transplant centers in the United States. Our pediatric nephrology fellowship program—one of a handful in the United States—attracts the best and brightest young doctors from around the world because of our excellent patient and organ survival outcomes.
For children with irreversible intestinal failure, our Intestinal Care Program is the only program in the Pacific Northwest—and one of only a few in the country—that has specialists who can perform intestine transplants. In fact, our specialists have provided care for more children with intestinal failure than any other doctors in the nation.
Our commitment to organ donation
Our physicians and nurses are working to improve access to organs for children who need lifesaving organ transplants. Because Children’s provides specialty care across a six-state region—Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Hawaii—we are uniquely positioned to search for viable organs in a wider geographic area than many other children’s hospitals.
Dr. Ruth McDonald is an at-large member of the UNOS Board of Directors and a member of the Kidney/Pancreas Transplantation Committee.
Dr. Jorge Reyes is chair of the national Pediatric Transplantation Committee
for UNOS—the United Network for Organ Sharing. Drs. Robert Boucek, Patrick Healey, Simon Horslen and Ruth McDonald also serve on this committee. Dr. Reyes is also a member of the Joint Membership Criteria Subcommittee. UNOS is the nonprofit organization that matches all organs with recipients in the United States and collects data about all transplants occurring in this country.
Many of our leadership team physicians are members of other UNOS committees:
Dr. Robert Boucek is a member of the Heart Subcommittee, Heart/Lung Working Group and Joint Pediatric-OPO Subcommittee.
Dr. Simon Horslen is the chair of the Joint Pediatric-Liver and Intestine Subcommittee, an at-large member of the Liver/Intestine Transplantation Committee and a member of the Joint Membership Criteria Subcommittee.
Learn more about heart, intestine, kidney and liver organ donation.