About us

We provide comprehensive kidney transplant services:

• Before transplantation
• During transplantation
• After transplantation

Public and private patients are welcome, as well as regional and metropolitan patients.

Our services

Before transplantation

We run an efficient workup and education program aimed at maximising transplant opportunities and outcomes for people with advanced kidney disease including:

• Pre-transplant evaluation and care of recipient candidates
• Pre-transplant evaluation and care of living donor candidates
• International donor transplant evaluation and care
• Increased risk transplant multidisciplinary assessment service
• Transplant urology, cardiology, psychiatry, infectious disease, and dermatology services
• Renal genetics service for recipients and donors with inherited kidney disease
• Transplant patient and family education

Kidney Machine Perfusion Program

To improve access to and outcomes from deceased donor kidney transplantation, we support a comprehensive Kidney Machine Perfusion Program for Victorians and Tasmanians at all transplant centres. The available technologies are:

• Hypothermic (cold) oxygenated machine perfusion
• Normothermic (body temperature) machine perfusion

This program is offered in collaboration with the Victorian and Tasmanian Retrieval Service.

Our clinics

We run the following clinics:

• Kidney Transplant Workup Clinic
• Transplant Surgical Evaluation Clinic
• Transplant Anaesthetic Evaluation Clinic

During transplantation

The transplant team comprises a group of specialist physicians, surgeons, anaesthetists, nurses, and allied health staff with experience performing transplantation and caring for transplant donors and recipients during surgery.

We provide the following services:

• Living donor kidney donation surgery
• Living donor transplantation via directed donors
• Living donor transplantation via the Australia and New Zealand Kidney Exchange Program
• Deceased donor transplantation
• Blood type incompatible (ABO) transplantation (living and deceased donors)
• Increased viral risk donor transplantation
• Marginal donor transplantation
• Higher immunological risk transplantation
• Desensitisation therapy
• Higher surgical complexity transplantation
• High dependency unit and intensive care unit support
• Combined kidney and other organ transplantation (for example, kidney-liver or kidney-liver-stomach-small intestine transplantation)
• Repeat transplantation for patients with failed transplants
• Machine perfusion rejuvenation of selected kidneys

After transplantation

We provide complete after transplant care for donors and recipients to maximise long-term health and wellbeing through preventative healthcare, and early diagnosis and treatment of health issues relating to transplantation.

Our service can be tailored to the needs of patients involved in shared care arrangements with private nephrologists or referring health services.

We provide the following services:

• Transplant medication management/pharmacy service with medication mail-out option
• Transplant biopsy and expert transplant histopathology service
• Access to subsidised transplant-specific pathology testing
• Treatment of rejection
• Treatment of transplant-related infections
• Treatment of cancer in transplant recipients
• Pre-conception counselling and management of transplant recipients planning pregnancy
• Care of pregnant transplant recipients before, during and after delivery
• Interventional radiology service for transplant recipients
• 24/7 medical phone support for patients or doctors
• Telehealth service
• Regional outreach service
• Shared care of patients seeing private nephrologist
• Shared care of patients from referral centres

Our clinics

We run the following clinics:

• Daily Acute Transplant Clinic
• Post Kidney Transplant Clinic
• Living Kidney Donor Clinic
• Renal Surgery Clinic
• Transplant Dermatology Clinic
• Transplant Endocrine-Bone Clinic
• Transplant Infectious Disease and Travel Clinics

Related services

• Kidney care & dialysis

  We care for people with kidney disease and other conditions related to the kidneys.

Contact us

Kidney Transplant Service

Phone: 03 9496 5685

Fax: 03 9496 5123

Email: kidney.transplant@austin.org.au

For urgent issues (24 hours/7 days)

If you are feeling very sick and unwell, call 000 for an ambulance.

Phone: 03 9496 5000 (ask for the Renal Transplant Registrar or Nephrologist on call)

Specific enquiries

Appointments: 03 9496 2444 (Specialist Clinics) or 03 9496 5685 (Kidney Transplant Service)

Non-urgent pre-transplant (transplant workup) enquiries: 03 9496 5041

Non-urgent post-transplant (transplant recipient) enquiries: 03 9496 3992

Non-urgent living donor enquiries: 03 9496 3090

Location

Level 7, HSB Building
Austin Hospital
145 Studley Road
Heidelberg VIC

View location maps

Postal address

Kidney Transplant Service
Department of Nephrology
Austin Health
PO Box 5555
Heidelberg Victoria 3084