Resource Newsletter Archive
The Tissue Services Celebrates It's 15th Year
Tissue Services Director Margery Moogk.
That describes Northwest Tissue Services as we celebrate our 15th anniversary. Through the many changes and challenges in tissue banking since we began in February 1988, we've remained dedicated to providing high-quality tissues for transplant, to practices that help ensure patient safety, and to our respectful treatment of donors and their families.
The Tissue Services was established in response to community need. Our founders were confident that an independent, nonprofit tissue bank represented the best way to provide tissue for patients in the Northwest. We have been accountable to a board whose mission is focused on its commitment to best serve the patients, hospitals and donors in our region.
We were founded as and are proud to be a division of Puget Sound Blood Center, the highly respected provider of blood services in western Washington for nearly 60 years. The Northwest Kidney Center participated in our formation to ensure that the high standards and practices it had established in organ donation helped define the new regional tissue bank.
Another founding partner was the University of Washington Medical Center Department of Orthopaedics. Dr. Ernest “Chappie” Conrad, our medical director from the beginning, has always made patient safety his and our first priority. Currently, he serves as the director of the Pediatric Bone Tumor Clinic at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center and is professor and interim director at the University of Washington Medical Center Department of Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine.
Regional Supervisor Jan Hendrix will direct the Tissue Services's Missoula-based team.BY THE NUMBERS
• In our 15 years, Northwest Tissue Services has honored the wishes of 3,400 donor families who have generously consented to donation at the most difficult times of their lives.
• By the end of this year, we will have provided more than 70,000 tissues for transplant surgeries.
• More than 85 percent of those 70,000 tissues have been transplanted in our region, but we've also provided for patients in every state, six Canadian provinces and ten other countries. In all, we've sent tissue to nearly 900 transplant facilities.
Expanding services We began as a bone bank, providing high-quality musculoskeletal allografts for many types of orthopedic and neurological surgeries and meeting a specific community need in Dr. Conrad's specialty— bone transplants for pediatric limb-sparing surgeries. Over the past 15 years, these osteochondral allografts have helped many adolescents and children avoid amputation, not only in this region, but also across the country. We are one of very few tissue banks that are trusted for these critical allografts.
At the request of the region's only burn center, at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center, we started banking skin allografts. Then, responding to cardiovascular surgeons in the community, we expanded to processing heart valves and, more recently, saphenous veins. We've also developed programs to provide cellular-based therapies, establishing the first and only community cord blood bank in our region and processing peripheral blood stem cells. Under Dr. Jo Anna Reems' leadership, we were one of only six domestic and international programs funded to process islet cells for transplant to diabetic patients.
Great staff We have been fortunate to retain over a long term a staff that has given us the expertise and energy to work toward improvements in tissue banking in our region and on the national scene. Dr. Richard Counts, president of Puget Sound Blood Center, and the board of trustees had the foresight to establish the Tissue Services and have continued to support its growth.
Dr. Conrad, Dr. Mike Strong, now the executive vice president of operations at the Blood Center, and I have been with the Tissue Services from those early days. Dr. Strong recently won the George W. Hyatt Memorial Award from the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB) for his contributions to the advancement of tissue banking.
Jan Hendrix, our versatile Montana-based supervisor, who has served in a number of roles, joined the Tissue Services in 1988. Within a year after we started, our technical supervisor, Murray Anderson, also joined the staff. Candy Wells, Hospital Services supervisor, has more than 12 years of experience in tissue and organ donation. Our current 45 employees have a total of more than 200 years of tissue and cell banking experience. Our 35 tissue bankers average 5.5 years of experience with us.
Commitment to improvement The Tissue Services has been accredited by AATB continuously for more than twelve years. We've served on numerous AATB committees and task forces. For six years, I was chair of the Council of Accredited Banks, and I'm in my tenth year on the board of directors, now as an officer. We are proud to have made significant contributions toward defining ethical donation and banking practices, increasing standards for quality and safety, improving relationships with the FDA, and advancing the science of tissue banking.
Our entire technical staff in Seattle has been certified by AATB as tissue banking specialists. Our Quality Assurance group, led by Dawn Johnson, is one of the first and best in the country. Are we proud? You betcha!
What does our immediate future hold? We are happy to report some exciting developments in both donation and tissue transplantation. These changes will improve our ability to serve donor families in the more farflung parts of our territory and respond to the needs of patients and surgeons for new types of bone products.
Missoula satellite opening We've always been committed to serving our entire region—all of Washington, Montana, and northern Idaho. We've been able to do this most cost-effectively from our base in Seattle. Recently, we've faced increasing costs, like many other operations that rely on air transportation.
To ensure that we continue to provide the same level of service and commitment to Montana families, we are establishing a Montana recovery team, under the direction of our Kalispell-based Montana supervisor, Jan Hendrix. We've been lucky to recruit a staff of Montanans already experienced in donation who will work from Missoula to serve our eastern territories even more efficiently than we have in the past. (For a look at our commitment to a community on the very “edge” of the area we serve, see our story on Plentywood,)
New relationships improve our ability to serve As part of our ongoing commitment to meet the region's needs for transplant tissue, we've entered into partnerships with national tissue processors we trust, to provide proprietary patented bone allografts used in our regional hospitals. These new tissues are backed by sound research and development and demonstrate improved healing times and patient outcomes. One of our new partners is the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation (MTF), the highly respected, New Jersey-based, nonprofit national program that works with approximately half of the nation's organ procurement agencies and a number of other tissue banks.
A second partner is Osteotech, Inc., also in New Jersey. Osteotech has long been a respected tissue processor, and like MTF, is accredited by AATB. Both are active, responsible leaders in the association and trusted colleagues with whom we've worked for years.
One category of new allografts we will be distributing is the MTF/Synthes highly machined, precisely tooled bone grafts that are easily implanted during spinal surgeries using matching instrumentation. The second category is the demineralized, easy-to-deliver bone pastes, putties and gels, available both as Osteotech's Grafton® DBM products and as MTF's DBX® line.
In formulating relationships with our new partners, some issues were non-negotiable for us. We have been committed to providing these products from bone we have recovered, so we can be confident that donor suitability, recovery and processing, serological screening, and microbiological testing comply with our strict policies and procedures. We sought relationships with partners who respect that objective.
So we can continue to assure fair and equal access for all patients in the area we serve, we found partners who agreed that all the products will be returned to us for distribution. Hospitals will still see the representatives for Synthes, DBX®, and Osteotech Grafton® DBM, but our hospitals will place orders with us. The tissue will arrive with the familiar Tissue Services labeling and transplant records to assure staff that they can expect the same level of quality they have come to trust from Northwest Tissue Services.
We will continue to grow and change, but our mission and values will remain constant. Under the direction of our community board, we will provide excellent tissue banking services, always mindful of our responsibilities to the donor families and patients we serve.