The Heart Failure Unit at the Hadassah University Hospital was established in order to provide the basis for the National Heart Transplant Program. Since then it has developed into an active center that offers comprehensive medical care to heart failure patients. A multidisciplinary team of expert physicians, nurses, dieticians and social workers provides the patients with extensive coverage.

Our program is primarily based on a very active out-patient clinic and a day-care facility operating throughout the week. In addition, patients can be hospitalized in regular medical ward beds, monitored beds and in the intensive cardiac care unit that is fully equipped for hemodynamic monitoring. This infrastructure has proven to be excellent for treating patient's symptoms and improving their functional capacity and quality of life, prolonging survival and keeping them as much as possible out of the hospital. The active heart transplant program at our hospital combined with the fully equipped modern cardiology facilities, that include state-of-the-art Echocardiography, Interventional Cardiology and Electrophysiology laboratories, have turned our unit into a leading tertiary center for patients with advanced heart failure. Since its establishment the Heart Failure Unit has evaluated and treated over one thousand patients with moderate and severe heart failure. Many patients who are initially referred to the unit as candidates for a heart transplant, but who are subsequently found not to be in need of or have contraindications for transplantation, prefer to remain in our program as regular heart failure patients.

Patients who eventually deteriorate into true endstage heart failure and are otherwise free of contra indications are automatically listed for transplantation at our center. The sickest patients, those requiring inotropic or mechanical support (defined as status I patients by UNOS classification), are hospitalized until transplant. Due to the severe shortage of organ donors in Israel and the constantly increasing waiting time for transplant, we recently introduced into our program a mechanical "artificial heart" as a "bridge to transplantation". This left ventricular assist device (LVAD) can be implanted in critically ill patients to keep them alive until a donor heart becomes available.

Since our program was initiated, 120 patients have been followed in our center after heart transplantation. Ten percent of the patients were under the age of 21 at the time of transplantation. Our medium and long-term survival rates are comparable to those of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT). Many of our patients are still alive over 10 years after transplant. The longest living post-transplant patient followed by us has survived over 17 years.
Most patients live a full life after transplantation, regaining normal quality of life and physical capabilities, in parallel with normalization of their left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF).