Transplant Nursing

Transplant nursing is the delivery of specialized nursing care focused on protecting, promoting, and optimizing the health and abilities of both the transplant recipient and the living donor across the life span. Patient care includes prevention, detection, and treatment of illness and injury related to diseases treated by solid organ transplantation and to diseases that may result from living donation. Transplant nursing also addresses the prevention of further disease and the promotion of optimal health and well-being of organ recipients and donors.

ANA and the International Transplant Nurses Society convened a workgroup of transplant nurse experts from to update and expand the 2008 edition to accommodate ongoing and anticipated changes in their specialty and in health care. With input from numerous nurses, they developed this revised edition. It is a comprehensive delineation of the competent level of practice and professional performance common to and expected from transplant registered nurses in all practice levels and settings.

The publication’s scope of practice addresses what is expected of all transplant nurses, specifying the who, what, where, when, why, and how of their practice. This gives the context—the underlying assumptions, characteristics, environments and settings, education and training requirements, key issues and trends, and ethical and conceptual bases of transplant nursing—needed to understand and use the standards.

Those 16 standards, which offer a framework for evaluating practice outcomes and goals, are those by which all transplant nurses are held accountable for their practice. The set of specific competencies accompanying each standard serves as evidence of minimal compliance with that standard. A foundational volume that is primarily for those directly involved with transplant nursing practice, education, and research, other nurses and allied healthcare providers, researchers, and scholars will find value in this content. It is also a resource for employers, insurers, lawyers, policy makers, regulators, and stakeholders involved in solid organ transplantation.

About ANA’s Specialty Nursing Standards

Since the late 1990s, ANA has partnered with other nursing organizations to establish a formal process for recognition of specialty areas of nursing practice. This includes the criteria for approving the specialty itself and the scope statement, and an acknowledgment by ANA of the standards of practice for that specialty. Because of the significant changes in the evolving nursing and healthcare environments, ANA’s approval of specialty nursing scope statements and its acknowledgment of specialty standards of practice remain valid for five years, starting from the publication date of the documents. The standards in this publication are based on language from ANA’s Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice, Second Edition, a helpful supplement to this specialty text, which in turn is of optimal use with two complementary ANA texts: Nursing’s Social Policy Statement and Guide to the Code of Ethics for Nurses. Together, these three books help guide nursing practice, thinking, and decision-making. The set is proving useful as a professional reference, classroom textbook, in-service training guide, and credentialing exam resource.