Telangana govt hospitals gear up for organ transplants

A centralised State organ transplantation hub, which will be equipped with nearly eight high-end operation theatres at Gandhi Hospital is coming up with a cost of Rs 30 crore in the coming few months.

Hyderabad: In a concerted effort to encourage government hospitals to be more proactive and take up more organ donations and transplantations, the Telangana government in the past few months has launched a series of measures, which could reduce the waiting time for needy patients and increase the share of transplant surgeries in government hospitals, when compared to private hospitals.

To conduct more organ transplant surgeries, government teaching hospitals like Gandhi Hospital and Osmania General Hospital (OGH), struggled with two major bottlenecks i.e., infrastructure deficiencies and a lack of proper guidelines to declare brain-dead patients.

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On a daily basis, district and teaching hospitals in Telangana receive a large number of trauma cases out of which a majority do not recover and end up as fatalities. Since teaching hospitals were not declaring such patients as brain dead, the cadaver donor organs of the deceased were left unused.

To address this difficulty, Health Minister T Harish Rao in October instructed all government hospitals to declare critical patients, whose chances of survival are none, as brain dead. The Minister also constituted a committee comprising senior health officials to formulate necessary guidelines and protocols on brain dead declaration.

To address the limitations of infrastructure, a centralised State organ transplantation hub, which will be equipped with nearly eight high-end operation theatres at Gandhi Hospital is coming up with a cost of Rs 30 crore in the coming few months.

The State government has also laid focus on Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) to intensify its efforts on organ transplantations. As a result, in the month of October, the NIMS transplant surgeons successfully conducted three complex organ transplants of heart, liver, and kidneys.

Despite not taking up brain-dead cadaver organ transplantation, for the past decade, OGH has been at the forefront of conducting living-related kidney transplants. Overall, OGH has conducted over 700 living-related kidney transplants out of which anywhere between 300 and 400 kidney transplants were done in the last decade.

“OGH is the leader in conducting living-related kidney transplants in government hospitals and has so far conducted nearly 700 living-related kidney transplants. Efforts are also on in a big way, to take up brain dead declaration, which will give a big push to cadaver organ transplantation in government hospitals,” said Professor and Head, Nephrology, Osmania Medical College, Dr Manisha Sahay.