Christopher Hughes, M.D.

Transplant Surgery
Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville

As chair of the Division of Transplant Surgery, Dr. Christopher Hughes sees several tenets of the Mayo Clinic Model of Care in action every day. He attended medical school at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, did graduate work at Vanderbilt University then spent two years of transplant training at Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

"I heard about Mayo while I was in medical school," he recalls. "In residency I applied for a transplant fellowship at Mayo because I heard it was one of the best places to train. The facilities here are unmatched, and the expertise of the surgeon teaching me was fantastic."

Today, Dr. Hughes cares for patients who have end-stage liver, kidney or pancreas failure. He heads up the liver transplant program at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, which began in 1998, and is now considered one of the top five in the nation. In 2006, Mayo Clinic Jacksonville performed 374 transplants.

Dr. Hughes is eager to talk about the success of the program and what sets it apart from similar programs.

" Other transplant centers wait for the perfect organ to transplant. In other situations, patients are too sick to be transplanted," he says. "We're unlike other centers because ours is totally dedicated to transplants. In fact, Mayo Clinic Jacksonville is unique in that Transplant is its own department. We have a phenomenal staff of hepatologists, pulmonary physicians, nephrologists, critical care transplant physicians, all of whom are dedicated to transplant. We can combine heart bypass with liver transplant; we've done 10 open-heart surgeries combined with liver transplant."

Dr. Hughes is especially proud of the program's high success rates, especially for liver transplants. "Our one-year survival rate is around 90 percent," he says, "That's high. Some of our success stems from our allied health staff (more than 100) and the level of care we can deliver with dedicated staff. We have the infrastructure that allows us to do high numbers of transplants, and we have the expertise."

Dr. Hughes credits the Mayo Clinic Model of Care for being essential to the program's development and success. "Transplant takes a team," he says, "and an integrated approach. The Mayo Model of Care allows people with expertise to focus, and to collaborate with colleagues who are best at what they do."