New Life Post-Transplant (NLPT): The role of occupational medicine in a Tuscan inter-institutional project

Transplantation therapy may help to save or significantly improve the lives of thousands of patients suffering from very severe illnesses. In Italy, in recent years, this therapeutic strategy has been used with increasing frequency in a wide number of patients thanks to both scientific and socio-political reasons: modern surgical techniques and good clinical results achieved in the short and long term on one side, the improvement of the national and regional transplant organizations and the social sharing of organ donation on the other side. The purposes of transplantation therapy include the extension of survival, improvement in quality of life, and the return of the recipient as a contributing member of society. Today physicians have increasingly to deal with transplant patients in daily practice because of the generally growing number of transplants performed and the steadily improving prognosis. This constant development has determined the need to focus more on improving the overall outcome of transplanted patients, in all the various aspects of the quality constituents of life: physical, psychological and social/occupational. In fact, as showed by international experiences in the Literature, employment is an important measure of the ability to return to society. In such context we plan to develop a regional initiative which would assess all post-transplantation features in working-age patients.