My name's Alden Doyle. I'm the medical director for the kidney and pancreas transplant programs here at UVA. I had the realization while in medical school in Guatemala that in order to make a huge difference you had to not only be able to diagnose and treat people, but you had to change the way that healthcare was delivered. 

Transplant is special because you have a varied population of patients who know what it's like to be sick, sometimes almost mortally sick, and you can make them better in a durable way.

Patients should choose UVA because they have a combination of experience. They've been at the transplant game for years and years since the 60's. The size, they do over 100 kidneys a year. The outcomes, they're consistently better than national standards. And, mostly because it's a patient oriented program and people care.

Patients uniformly tell us when they come to visit from other centers is that the thing that they remembered is that the staff, the nurses, and the physicians cared about them and took good care of them, personalized care of them.

I like the science part, I like the academic part, and the teaching part, but nothing brings me back to clinic like the actual face-to-face patient care. I've had patients sometimes for 15 or 16 years. I watch them go from sick to well, watch them grow up, go to school, have kids, do things that they wanted to do in life. That's a wonderful thing.