Heart Transplant remains the definitive treatment for selected patients with end stage heart failure who have exhausted medical, device based, and surgical options. This session provides a thorough overview of candidate selection, listing criteria, donor matching, surgical technique, immunosuppression, and long term follow up, offering a balanced view of both the life saving potential and the complex challenges of transplantation. For many attendees, this session serves as a practical Heart Transplant roadmap that connects advanced heart failure management with transplant program realities.

The description begins with evaluation of transplant candidacy, including assessment of prognosis on medical therapy, comorbid conditions, psychosocial readiness, frailty, and support systems. Participants will learn how to interpret cardiopulmonary exercise testing, hemodynamic data from right heart catheterization, and risk scores that guide timing of referral and listing. The session explains allocation systems, donor organ evaluation, and matching based on size, blood type, urgency status, and geographic logistics.

A central emphasis is placed on implementing advanced heart transplant management strategies across the entire care continuum. Intraoperative and early postoperative care includes graft preservation principles, reperfusion management, hemodynamic monitoring, and prevention of primary graft dysfunction. Long term care focuses on immunosuppressive regimens, infection prophylaxis, renal protection, malignancy screening, rejection surveillance using biopsy and non invasive markers, and management of cardiac allograft vasculopathy.

Participants will explore the patient experience after transplantation, including rehabilitation, return to work or study, emotional adjustment, and lifestyle counseling. The session highlights how multidisciplinary teams involving cardiologists, surgeons, transplant coordinators, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, and social workers are essential to optimize survival and quality of life. Challenging scenarios, such as retransplantation, combined organ transplantation, and transplant in congenital heart disease, are also addressed.

The session also discusses ethical dimensions of organ allocation, communication with families during donor consent, and the importance of transparency and equity across transplant systems. Participants will reflect on cultural, economic, and geographic disparities that influence access to advanced therapies, and consider advocacy roles they can play within their own regions. Practical take home resources, including referral checklists and shared care templates for collaboration between transplant centers and community cardiologists, will help bridge gaps between specialized programs and everyday practice settings.

Real world case vignettes will anchor the discussion in lived patient journeys, illustrating how timely referral, coordinated perioperative care, and vigilant lifelong follow up can convert a terminal diagnosis into many additional years of meaningful life for carefully selected individuals. Future perspectives include precision immunosuppression guided by pharmacogenomics, non invasive rejection monitoring tools, xenotransplantation research, regenerative options that may delay or reduce the need for transplant, and mechanical circulatory support as a bridge or alternative. By the end of this session, attendees will appreciate how a coordinated heart conference style approach can translate cutting edge science into durable, patient centered outcomes.