Gwendolyn is a Pulmonary Nurse Specialist and Lung Transplant Coordinator at Temple University Hospital. She explains the process for diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary diseases as well as the operating criteria for late-stage lung transplants. A challenging yet incredibly rewarding career!
Transcript
>> Gwendolyn Vance [phonetic], Gwen. And I am a pulmonary nurse specialist, and currently I'm a lung transplant coordinator. So a pulmonary nurse specialist is someone who deals with advanced lung diseases like COPD, emphysema, pulmonary fibrosis, pulmonary hypertension, cystic fibrosis and all end stage lung disease. Essentially we're evaluating patients for any advanced treatments for their lung disease to either prolong their life or improve their quality of life. That's our goal is to either prolong or improve the quality. So for a person who has reached their end of their lung disease we will assess them, evaluate them for whether they're appropriate for transplant or not. So we'll bring them in, we'll discuss their medical, physical, psychological, financial, social support and evaluate whether they are sick enough for transplant because there is a risk associated with transplant, but not too sick where they wouldn't be likely to survive transplant. So we do the evaluation for them. That takes about two to three weeks of testing which I'm the primary person to get them through that process. It's physical testing heart, lung. We look at their blood, their liver, their kidneys, to check their psychosocial evaluation, make sure that they're mentally able to manage transplant, their social situation. If you don't have a social support system you really can't do transplant. It's a team effort. Even if you have one good friend that's social support. You have to have the money to pay for the medicines. The medicines are extremely expensive after transplant. So you have to have enough resources to either pay for them or get the resources to help pay for them such as Medicare or medical assistance. We evaluate them for that. Psychologically to make sure that they don't have any disabling depression, addiction or mental illness that would make transplant not a good idea. All of this is because transplant there's very few organs, but there's a lot of people who need the organs. So you want to make sure you have the very candidate. You don't want them to be limited by severe money problems or severe psychological problems. We try to assess those problems and see if we can help in any way to help them through that. And then if we can't we try to refer them to places that can help them.
Download transcript
