Psychosocial Factors/Issues impacting transplant recipients

[allcheeks89]

I'm a transplant social worker at a transplant center in the Detroit, MI area and I am also a transplant recipient (PAK). I work with primarily kidney transplant patients who deal with a host of psychosocial issues post transplant and was wondering what type of issues have others seen from their transplant population. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

[Beth Witten MSW ACSW]

You might want to look on PubMed for articles related to transplant.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/

For instance, when I looked just now for "kidney transplant" employment, I found a list of 20 studies, some of which have abstracts available. If you don't narrow it to kidney transplants and just look for transplant employment, there are 178 studies!

Lisa Raiz was a transplant social worker at the time she did research on patient employment status at Ohio State University Hospital. She found that 72% of transplant recipients said they were physically able to work, but only 58% were working and 41% were drawing disability benefits. She reported that the two strongest predictors of employment in the year prior to her study was receipt of a disability check and work status 1 day prior to transplant. [Raiz L. The transplant trap: the impact of health policy on employment status following renal transplantation. J Health Soc Policy. 8(4):67-87, 1997.]

Dialysis social workers and transplant social workers need to work together to help patients seeking transplant to plan for how to live as productively as possible after the transplant.