Janice Adams, nurse practitioner in the Department of Anesthesiology at UMass Memorial Medical Center and in-house coordinator for New England Organ Bank.

Janice Adams is a nurse practitioner in the Department of Anesthesiology at UMass Memorial Medical Center and the in-house coordinator for New England Organ Bank. Ms. Adams received her Master’s degree at the University of Massachusetts Graduate School of Nursing and has been a board-certified Acute Care Nurse Practitioner since 1998.

She is a member of the Medical Center’s Organ and Tissue Donation Committee, the Critical Care Operations Committee, and the hospital ethics committee and has represented UMass Memorial in national organizations related to organ donation. She is responsible for educating staff about organ donation and facilitating donations at the Medical Center.

Together, UMass Memorial and the New England Organ Bank are one of the 58 organ procurement organizations (OPOs) in the country and have helped to increase awareness and the actual number of donors. Through their efforts and the compassion of the Medical Center’s donor families, more than 150 organs have been donated in the past two years alone; 150 people on the national transplant waiting list (of more than 112,000 people) received the Gift of Life.

In addition, hundreds of lives have been improved through tissue transplants. In recognition of its efforts, the Medical Center has been awarded the distinguished Medal of Honor for the past five years by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. With an average of 18 people on the national transplant waiting list dying every day due to lack of organs for transplant, the work is just beginning.

Thank you to all who submitted questions for our Ask the Expert: Organ Donor session. Please see below for the full Q&A transcript.

More Information:

• February 14th is National Donor Day.
• Nationally, more than 112,000 patients are waiting for an organ.
• In 2011, there were about 7,000 deceased donors in addition to about 5,000 living organ donors, resulting in close to 24,000 transplants
• The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) maintains the only national patient waiting list and features the most comprehensive data available in any single field of medicine.
• For more information on organ and tissue donation, please contact the New England Organ Bank
• The UMass Memorial Transplant Program strongly believes in organ and tissue donation as a way to save thousands of lives for individuals waiting for an organ transplant. To learn about our highly skilled transplant team, living donor kidney transplant program and for contact and patient referral information, visit: UMass Memorial Organ Transplant Surgery.