Information for Surgeons
Mid South Eye Bank is a part of the patient care team and exists to serve your patients. As the front end of the corneal transplant process, our desire is to provide the physician with the very best quality tissue possible when you need it, where you need it and how you need it. If the surgeon has special needs patients or has special requirements, we will try our very best to meet those needs.
When a surgeon has a case which requires a transplant, the process is as follows:
- The physician’s nurse calls the eye bank to either put the patient on the waiting list (to wait in line for the next available tissue) or to put the patient on the list of scheduled surgery.
- The nurse should have recipient identifying data available (name, address, date of birth, SSN and patient diagnosis). She should also have a date and place of the anticipated surgery at least two weeks in advance. We can sometimes provide tissue on a shorter lead time but the closer in the schedule, the more difficult it is to meet the schedule.
- The nurse should also inform us of any special requirements or special procedures (DSEK, HLA matching, emergency or routine use, date and time the tissue will be needed, etc.)
On the appointed day, eye bank personnel deliver the tissue to the location (hospital, ASC) where the surgery will take place.
The eye bank will provide the physician with certain follow-up evaluations as required by law and required for accreditation, the adverse reaction report. Specifically, the eye bank must document that the transplant was successful and, if not, must investigate the cause for the adverse outcome.
Our waiting list is a patient-based list which means that patients, not physicians are in line for tissue. Our tissue is offered to the next patient on the list.