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Written By: Editorial Team | Updated : October 5, 2012 11:14 AM IST
City-based BLK Super Speciality Hospital launched a campaign on Thursday to create awareness on dead body organ transplantation. The campaign aims to encourage families of brain-dead patients to donate organs. The hospital also felicitated the parents of an accident victim who donated their daughter's organs, which saved five lives. Their 17-year-old girl was recently declared brain-dead after an accident.
A patient is termed brain dead when he/she is clinically and legally dead due to complete and irreversible loss of all brain functions. Almost 37 organs and tissues, including heart, kidneys, liver, lungs and pancreas can be garnered from such patients.
'My daughter met with an accident on August 23. She was declared brain-dead a few days later. We decided to donate all her organs. It was an emotional decision for all of us,' the girl's father said. 'We realized that our daughter was never going to return, so we decided to help others. The process of taking approval from authorities was arduous, but we managed to do that on time,' he added.
The case exposes the official procedures leading to delay in organ retrieval. The 17-year-old girl was declared brain dead on August 28 by the doctors at Delhi's BLK super-specialty hospital. Her family had to wait for five days to get clearance from the authorities before her organs could be harvested. They required police approval since it was a medico-legal case. Local authorities were unaware of the process and took time to issue an NOC. So, the victim's family approached Delhi health minister A K Walia to speed up the approval from forensic experts.
'Ideally, organs should be harvested within 24 hours of declaring a patient brain dead,' said Dr Rajesh Pande, director, department of critical care and emergency medicine. He added that they had to administer electrolyte, maintain the body temperature and ensure there is no infection till the time they got clearance.
According to the Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1995, cadaver donation is possible only when a patient is declared brain dead. If the deceased has not pledged during his or her lifetime to donate organs, the authority to give consent for cadaver donation lies with the person lawfully in possession of the body. Experts say that the law on organ transplant needs to be more clear and the need of the hour is to sensitize the authorities concerned - police officers and doctors.
According to a recent data, 1.25 lakh Indians died in road accidents last year, and less than 20,000 of them donated their organs. Thousands of patients die in India due to unavailability of organs.
"There has been a renewed interest in cadaver transplant because of the huge gap in supply and demand in cases of chronic renal failure, where the only possible remedy is cadaver transplant. In India, for varied reasons, this has not taken off to the extent of its potential," said Aditya Pradhan, senior consultant, urology at BLK Hospital.
