Doctors at Schneider Children’s Medical Center in Petah Tiqwa, Israel, recently performed seven back-to-back organ transplants, saving the lives of seven children, aged 4-16.
The marathon of operations required intense work hours, precise orchestration and the involvement of the entire medical staff at the hospital. The operations, which occurred over a span of two consecutive days and nights, included a heart and lung transplant, two liver transplants, and four kidney transplants.
All seven of these transplants were life-saving operations and successfully saved the lives of the child recipients.
The first child, a 14-year-old boy who suffered from a chronic lung disease, had been waiting for a lung and eart transplant for some time. A six-year-old and a nine-year-old boy were both waiting for liver transplants after they had suffered liver failure. Two other 16-year-old boys as well as two girls, one aged four, the other aged nine, all required kidney transplants.
The four kidney recipients and the two liver recipients all woke up a few hours after their respective surgeries in the ICU. Four of the children were transferred shortly thereafter to the children’s ward for further observation and care.
Schneider Children’s Medical Center, according to its website, “is the only comprehensive, highly specialized care hospital of its kind in the country and in the Middle East, dedicated exclusively to the well-being of all children and adolescents.”
The hospital is responsible for performing the vast majority of organ transplants for children in Israel. Schneider’s is one of the few hospitals in the world that is equipped to perform multiple organ transplants simultaneously. Due to its high level of excellence in the field, the hospital also treats child patients from the Palestinian Authority and Jordan, and from as far away as Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.
The hospital’s mandate is to serve as a “bridge to peace” in the region. Since the establishment of Schneider’s, doctors at the hospital have performed over 500 organ transplants for children.
