Spain is internationally recognized for its food, its wine, its weather—and for organ donation. The country has consistently been the international leader in organ donation and transplants for the past three decades, so much so that other nations around the world send their health professionals here to learn.
A critical part of the donation and transplant system is the Donation & Transplantation Institute (DTI): a Barcelona-based international organization with the mission to improve the quality of life of society; increase organ, tissue and cell donation and transplantation; and to promote the development of regenerative medicine via international cooperation. It maintains relationships with various health institutions, international associations, university hospitals, scientists and benefactors, advising and supporting public and private entities within the health-care system from all over the globe.
Institutional Relations Director of DTI, Isabel Rosselló. Photo courtesy of DTI.
The Birth of DTI
Isabel Rosselló is the DTI’s Institutional Relations Director, and the story of her involvement with the Donation & Transplantation Institute began in 1991. She met Dr. Martí Manyalich, the man who started the Transplant Procurement Management (TPM) Project—which offered training in organ donation and transplantation—while she was working at Hospital Clínic in Barcelona. The TPM’s aim was to increase the quantity, quality and effectiveness of organ and tissue donation for transplantation by training health-care professionals involved in the organ donation process.
Rosselló says that the work was extremely challenging, but that the boundless enthusiasm of Dr. Manyalich kept the project alive and growing. In 2008, the TPM board decided to create the Donation & Transplantation Institution Foundation. The DTI, which incorporated the TPM as its training unit, has since exported its model of the in-hospital transplantation coordinator to 101 countries. In the past 12 years, DTI has trained over 14,000 professionals from Europe, Latin America, Australia, the Middle East and Asia.
As Institutional Director, Roselló’s work focuses on managing the DTI’s relationships with local organizations, both academic and cultural; supporting the DTI’s national and international scholarship programs; and perhaps most importantly, the enormous amount of public relations required to raise awareness of the importance of organ donation within the general public, as well as the organization of benefit and solidarity events to raise funds for the organization and disseminate information about the importance of the DTI’s work to possible donors and partners. Two or three times a year the DTI organizes solidarity events, such as the charity concert to be held at the Palau de la Música on June 28, 2021.*
Raising Awareness
“Awareness is fundamental to getting society to understand the need for donation,” she says. “Our motto ‘save one million lives’ must reach not only medical professionals but also society in general.”
Therefore, apart from courses and training sessions for doctors and other health professionals directly involved in the donation-transplantation process, Rosselló’s department endeavors to educate the public via mass media and marketing. Media campaigns in general require a high budget in order to generate results, so one of her department’s main challenges is to identify actions with high-positive impact and relatively low investment.
The workplace has been recognized as an important and useful venue for health campaigns because it provides access to large and captive audiences. For this reason, the DTI offers guidance on corporate responsibility initiatives that give a company’s employees the opportunity to participate in initiatives which raise awareness about the importance of a healthy lifestyle as well as organ donation and transplantation.
The pan-European project EuDonOrgan is an example of a program that has been highly effective in helping to raise awareness. Through this program, the DTI Foundation has sensitized social leaders throughout Europe to the importance of the DTI’s objectives. EuDonOrgan is available to companies interested in raising awareness of the importance of organ donation and transplantations within their organization.
Photo courtesy of DTI.
Transplanting Smiles
The DTI is a non-profit entity and relies on various support structures to achieve its goals, including grants within the European system as well as private funds. Its primary beneficiaries are the hospitals around the world that, through their respective governments, request the DTI’s collaboration to help implement the DTI organ donation model. It also has the support of various private donors that have collaborated in the financing of some of the DTI’s projects.
One such project is the “Transplanting Smiles” campaign, which seeks to recognize the health center professionals who have helped to make Spain the world leader in organ transplantation. The project is made up of thousands of stories (and smiles) collected from 2,400 people interviewed over a nine-month period in ten transplantation centers across the country.
The campaign’s parallel objective is to raise public awareness of the importance of organ donation in general. The final phase of the project will be a documentary containing some of the interviews conducted during the visits through the transplant hospitals, including emotional stories from transplant patients, health-care professionals and donors' families.
Its message is simple yet profound: though organ donation, we can all help to save lives. “We are very proud,” says Rosselló, “to be able to say that the DTI has developed 21 international cooperative projects since its inception, and that it has contributed to reclaiming over 123,540 years of life that would otherwise have been lost without a transplant. For this I want to thank our staff, our pool of internationally recognized experts, and the Foundation’s 40 volunteers, who have all contributed to offering a second chance to millions of patients on the transplant waiting lists worldwide.”
If you’d like to learn more about the DTI and support its initiatives, take a look at its website, or consider making a donation to the foundation via its crowdfunding campaign on the Global Giving platform. Apart from donations, the DTI has a volunteer program through which anyone interested in collaborating with its mission can lend a hand.
You can follow the DTI on Facebook: @transplantprocurementmanagement, Twitter: @DTI_Foundation and connect on LinkedIn.
*The concert was originally scheduled for this year but had to be delayed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.