Carriage House Plans: Heart Transplan

Sunday, 18 November 2012

Heart Transplan

Margaret Allen entered the University of California, San Diego Medical School knowing she liked learning how things work, liked to fix problems and liked to work with her hands. A career in cardiothoracic surgery seemed a natural for her, an assumption later born out in 1985 when, working at Stanford University as a resident with famed cardiac pioneer Dr. Norman Shumway, she became the first female surgeon in the United States to transplant a heart.Since that historic moment, she has expanded beyond cardiothoracic surgery to build a multi-faceted career encompassing cutting-edge scientific research, public health advocacy and health education for minority communities. One of her highlights was to found the University of Washington Medical Center's first heart transplant program, thereby introducing the new technique to the Pacific Northwest. To assure that transplants would be available to all, she secured sufficient state Medicaid and insurance coverage, and kept costs among the lowest in the nation, including not charging professional fees for the transplant.Nominated as a Local Legend by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA-7), Allen is currently doing basic and translational research in tissue engineering with the goal of repairing and healing the heart muscle after an attack.An early member of the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), the national transplant network, she helped to inaugurate the practice of organ sharing in heart transplants. Then she became aware of both the long waiting times for kidney transplants among ethnic minority patients, and the geographic variations in waiting times for liver transplants.