Parel transplant centre: A new lease of life for patients with end-stage organ failure
The nationwide network will help recipients get organs from any part of the country
While the state’s cadaver donation programme has been seeing substantial growth every year, the setting up of Regional Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (ROTTO) is expected to take the growth to new heights.
According to Directorate of Health Services, while 38 cadaver donations were recorded in the state till March this year, the same period last year saw 15 donations. A total of 122 cadaver donations were recorded in Maharashtra in 2016.
Read: 2016: When Mumbai mastered the act of giving
The Zonal Transplant Coordination Centre (ZTCC) officials attributed this rise to better awareness. But now,with ROTTO, which will be set up in the next six months, the state wants to up its game by creating a wider pool of recipients and donors.
It will form state and region-wise waitlists of organ recipients. At present, these records are maintained by the ZTCC in Mumbai, Nagpur, Pune and Aurangabad.
Once all the five ROTTOs across the country (Chandigarh, Kolkata, Mumbai, Guwahati and Chennai) foster their programmes, the government plans to create a national wait-list registry of end-stage organ failure patients under National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO).
“We aim to create a programme, very similar to most western countries. For example, if there is an organ available in Maharashtra, and there is an eligible recipient in Kolkata, then that patient will get the organ, even if there is another patient on lesser priority living in the same city as the donor,” said Dr Kumar.
However, to achieve this feat, they has to be a very strong network between doctors, social workers and nurses within these states that fall under ROTTO, said Dr Anil Kumar, deputy director general and programme officer of the National Organ Transplant Programme.
“Five centres in India which have been actively creating awareness about cadaver donations and are promoting organ transplants, have been recognised. These centres have been funded by the central government to now make them into centres of excellence for organ transplants,” he said.
ROTTO’s will be responsible for penetrating the organ and cadaver donation programmes into states and regions where people don’t know about it, he added.
The ROTTO centre in Maharashtra, which will be at KEM Hospital in Parel, has already received Rs63 lakh from the Centre.
One of the main short-term objectives of the ROTTO will be to train doctors, surgeons and medical social workers to network with each other. “At present a lot of organs go waste because the networking between the districts, cities and even states is inadequate,” Dr Kumar said.
The ROTTO will hold its first training programme where officials from its parent body National Organ and Tissue Transplant will deliver a series of lectures, said Dr Sujata Pathwardhan, urologist at KEM Hospital, who has been appointed to set up the ROTTO.
Another important objective will be to encourage organ donations from civic-run hospitals which see maximum numbers of brain deaths.
“These hospitals have faired extremely poorly in the cadaver donation programme. They don’t have many medical social workers who can counsel the relatives of brain dead patients. However, ROTTO is likely to change this scenario,” said Dr Gauri Rathod, assistant director, directorate of health services.
Eleven medical social workers will be appointed to civic-run hospitals under ROTTO to explain the relatives, how organ donations of brain dead patients saves lives of those with end-stage organ failure.
ROTTO also plans to set up a cadaver lab in Mumbai where surgeons can be trained on organ retrieval but the proposal for this is yet to be cleared by NOTTO.