Kidney Transplantation

Kidney transplant manual for recipients and donors This online manual created by Allina Patient Education gives basic information and can help answer a lot of questions for kidney transplant recipients and donors.

A kidney transplant is an option for patients who are experiencing end-stage kidney (or renal) disease. The Kidney Transplantation program offers transplantations from both living and deceased donors.

Kidney transplant

A kidney transplant is surgery to place a healthy kidney into a person with kidney failure.

To learn more about kidney transplants click here.

The care team includes a donor coordinator, recipient coordinators, nephrologists, surgeons, pharmacists, and many other staff members who are specially trained to care for transplant patients.

Living kidney donation

Anyone interested in donating a kidney (living donor) may contact Susanna Gust, RN by calling 612-863-8886 to request a packet of information and to undergo screening. Living donors may be related or unrelated to the recipient. Or, fill out the Potential Kidney Donor Registration Form.

Paired donation

Abbott Northwestern's Transplantation Department participates in the North Central Donor Exchange Cooperative.

In living paired donation, there are 2 pairs of donors and recipients. In the first pair, donor 1 is not compatible with recipient 1. As well, donor 2 and recipient 2 are also incompatible. However, the good news is that donor 1 and recipient 2 are compatible and donor 2 is compatible with recipient 1. When this happens, the care team will conduct complete evaluations for a matched exchange with each pair and the surgeries are scheduled to take place at the same time.

Learn more by visiting www.ncdec.org.

Patient story

Organ donation: transforming a life Judy Wittenberg recalls clearly what her doctor said on the day she had surgery that would allow her to donate a kidney to her older brother, Jeff Wittenberg.