Being admitted to the transplant centre

Your transplant team will often arrange transport to collect you from home and bring you to the hospital. If you are on the Super-Urgent or Urgent list you are likely to already be in the hospital.

Information will be given to you about when you should stop eating and drinking. It’s very important that your stomach is empty before the operation. Having an empty stomach helps reduce the risk of vomiting that might cause damage to your lungs when you are asleep.

When you come into hospital you’ll meet a lot of nurses and doctors. You will be assessed to see whether you are still fit enough for an anaesthetic and for the transplant. Blood tests will be taken, and your pulse, blood pressure and temperature will be checked. You are likely to have a chest X-ray.

If the heart transplant team think that you may not be fit enough for a heart transplant operation, they will discuss this with you.

The anaesthetist will check that you’re fit enough for a general anaesthetic. A general anaesthetic means that you will be completely asleep during the operation. The anaesthetist will tell you about the drips and tubes that you will need, and the benefits and risks of these. They’ll also tell you how your pain will be controlled after the operation. If you’ve had any problems with anaesthetics before, it’s important that you tell them. If members of your family have had serious reactions to anaesthetics, please tell your anaesthetist.

Every donor and every heart is different. Some donated hearts carry more risks than others. This would have been explained to you at the time of being put on the transplant list.

If the donated heart that has been accepted for you has any unusual risks, your transplant team will discuss this with you when you come into hospital.

The transplant team will not offer you an organ if they think the risks are greater than the benefits.

Learn about how the health of your donor can affect the donated heart

The surgical team caring for you will explain their surgical process and answer any of your questions.

Learn more about heart transplant surgery

If tests detect that you have a new, serious health problem, the transplant may be too risky to do.

Sometimes tests on the donor can raise concerns about the donated heart that weren't known at the time that the heart offer was accepted. This might be because of a new blood test result in the donor, or because there is concern about the function of the donor heart.

Even though a heart transplant is a priority operation, if there are sudden life-threatening emergencies in other patients, they may need to be taken to theatre before you. If these operations take a long time, the heart meant for you might no longer be safe to transplant into you.

This very rarely happens in the UK. Your transplant team will be doing everything they can to get your heart transplant done, but sometimes this is not possible. The heart transplant team will explain in detail why this happened and what your options are.

Some donors have not been diagnosed as dead at the time that you are called into hospital (DCD – donation after circulatory death donors). These donors are expected to die within hours of their treatment being stopped, and so an organ retrieval team is standing by in the donor's hospital at the time of treatment withdrawal. Sometimes, these donors take many hours or even days to die.  In these circumstances, it is not possible for the retrieval team to stay on site indefinitely.

There are also occasions where a donor has reached the end of their life and is still receiving life-sustaining treatment. The retrieval team is alerted, but sometimes the donor becomes unstable and dies before the retrieval team arrives at the donor hospital. This may mean that the organs become unusable.

Another reason is that circumstances for the donor family may change and they may choose to withdraw their consent/authorisation before the donor is moved to the operating theatre.  While this is rare, we will respect the decisions of the donor family.