Emily Blumberg, M.D., immediate-past American Society of Transplantation president
As COVID-19 cases began increasing globally, conversations among health care providers about the pandemic’s potential impact on transplant started to emerge. Within a few days, organ donation and transplant communities from around the world had assembled to collaborate on a webinar series sharing real-world, global experiences for the organ donation and transplant community.
“This sense of the need to educate our communities—both individually and potentially as a group—came up, and we started sending around emails amongst ourselves,” said transplant infectious disease specialist Emily Blumberg, M.D., who recently served as president of the American Society of Transplantation.
Registration for the first live, collaborative webinar “COVID-19: Organ Donation and Transplant Town Hall,” launched on March 23 and the 1,000 available seats filled within a few hours. Collaboration continued over the following weeks, with three additional webinars covering topics ranging from protecting the workforce to conversations around testing. Collectively, the webinar recordings have been viewed more than 25,000 times.
In a recent interview, Blumberg talked about how the organ donation and transplantation community united amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to launch the webinar series.
