Telangana govt to offer free of cost ‘organ transplantation’ for needy

State ramping up facilities to provide the services at free of cost to needy patients at government tertiary hospitals

Hyderabad: A concerted effort is underway by the State government to ensure expensive organ transplantation services are available to needy patients at government tertiary hospitals in Hyderabad. The gradual reduction of positive Covid cases has now allowed the Health Department to renew developmental projects which were put on the backburner during the pandemic.

With the resumption of non-Covid services across all the public healthcare institutions, authorities have initiated the process of establishing new and modern infrastructure needed to conduct organ transplantation in the city. As part of these efforts, Health Minister Eatala Rajender recently held a review meeting with senior health officials to fast track the project to establish a high-end organ transplant facility at Gandhi Hospital at a cost of nearly Rs 35 crore.

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A modern operation theatre complex comprising at least six modular OTs meant to take up organ transplantation and other high-end surgeries from various medical departments will come up at the Gandhi Hospital. To ensure the complex is efficiently utilised, the Health Department will allocate the OTs to other medical specialities including orthopaedic department, so that the costly knee replacement surgeries can be offered free of cost.

The plan is to convert the hospital’s eighth floor, which also houses the hi-tech central diagnostic laboratory and ICU, to establish a hub for orthopaedic, gastroenterology, urology and organ transplantation at a cost of anywhere between Rs 50 crore to Rs 60 crore. Senior health officials said that the eighth floor with one lakh square feet of area would be ample to support organ transplantation, gastroenterology, urology and orthopaedics.

Apart from Gandhi Hospital, focus is also on Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) where kidney and urology towers are being planned to encourage surgeons to conduct more number of organ transplants. A couple of years ago, NIMS had established eight modular OTs for urology, gastroenterology and other medical departments at the trauma and speciality block in its campus out of which two theatres are being utilised for organ transplantation.

However, the existing modular theatres at NIMS are not enough to meet the demand of the ever growing number of patients who need organ transplantation under Jeevandan organ donation initiative. Due to the rising incidence of kidney and liver diseases and the requirement of specialised care including transplantation surgeries, ICU’s etc., the State government and the hospital management is in the process of raising funds to establish exclusive transplantation towers for kidney and liver transplantation within the hospital campus.

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