[Securing transplantation medicine. Duties of the German Foundation for Organ Transplantation (DSO)].

Due to a lack of confidence, the organ transplantation system in Germany is currently in a crisis. This was triggered by waiting list manipulations at four transplant centers in 2012, which led to a public debate that continues to this day and a dramatic decline in the number of post-mortem organ donations. This problem affects the 11,000 critically ill patients on the waiting list who are in urgent need of a post-mortem organ donation for their own survival. Also affected are transplantation medicine physicians and facilities whose work in organ donations is severely influenced by the resurgent discussion of brain death diagnosis and the medical and ethical criteria for the allocation of organs. Despite extensive documentation of donor/organ data, receiver data, and functional data, the necessary transparency to assess and represent the quality of transplantation medicine in Germany is not available due to systematic segregation of the information by the databases. Therefore, the joint efforts of all stakeholders are required to restore confidence in a transparent high-quality organ donation and transplantation process based on a transplant registry.