Organ donors receive recognition from Providence

So far this year, four organ donors at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank provided organs to benefit 10 recipients, and 15 patients gave their bone or tissue to help others, such as corneas that are used to restore people’s sight.

Overall, 19 donors at the Providence Health & Services of Southern California hospitals gave organs, bone and tissue to benefit more than 100 patients, according to a statement this week. The news comes as the Southern California region is poised to set a national record for organ donation.

Each November, Providence honors donors from St. Joseph’s, Tarzana and Holy Cross with a rose dedication ceremony, said Samantha Amen, an intensive care unit nurse at St. Joseph’s who helps counsel patients and families on organ donation.

Family members write dedications, which are affixed to roses that are later placed on the annual Rose Parade float for OneLegacy, the organ procurement organization for the seven counties in the Los Angeles area. Amen said she will be going to put some of the roses on the float on Dec. 29.

Tom Mone, the chief executive of OneLegacy, said those types of events are a “powerful symbol of the generosity of the people in our community.”

There are about 13 million Californians registered to donate organs, or about 40% of the population, which is below the national average of 50%, according to the state’s registry.

Amen said she thinks many young people don’t think about being donors, and older people think their organs can’t be used. She encourages young people to think about their end-of-life plans, but she said older patients should also not rule out the value of their potential to donate tissue, either.

People can sign up for the state’s organ donor registry when renewing their licenses or online at www.donatelifecalifornia.org, but actual full organ donation is a “rarity,” he said, due to strict criteria that must be met — potential donors must be declared brain dead, but kept alive long enough for many of the organs to be recovered.

As of September, more than 23,000 organ transplants had been performed from nearly 11,250 donors this year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.

As of this week, there were more than 122,000 people across the country awaiting organs, roughly one in five are in California, according to the government data. That’s largely because hospitals are able to keep patients alive and healthy enough to receive organs longer, Mone said.

The registry is like a giant haystack, he said, and finding an actual donor who meets all the criteria for organ donation is like finding a needle in it. He estimated that 75% of those who are medically eligible to donate organs do so, but less than 1% of patients meet the criteria to be donors.

Requirements are less stringent for bone and tissue donation, which he said can help recipients heal and may even save lives.

Annually, OneLegacy, which serves the largest population in the country, gets about 6,000 calls notifying them of potential organ donors. It gets 10 times as many calls about potential bone and tissue donors.

After testing procedures and a matching process, that gets winnowed down to fewer than 500 actual organ donors each year and about 2,500 bone and tissue donors.

This year, he said, the organization is set to have 460 organ donors, which will set a national record.

“We give them the opportunity to make something good come out of their tragedy,” he said.

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Chad Garland, chad.garland@latimes.com

Twitter: @chadgarland