Cadaveric organ transplantation at SCB soon

Cuttack: The State Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (SOTTO) approval to SCB Medical College and Hospital (SCBMCH) here has paved the way for kick-starting the much-awaited cadaveric organ transplantation at SCB, the largest state-run referral healthcare facility in Odisha.

Sources said a high-level meeting in this regard will be organised at Delhi which would discuss the modalities. A team of National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organisation (NOTTO) will visit SCB to further the process thereafter.

With cadaveric transplantation, organs like kidney, liver, pancreas, lungs and cornea from brain-dead patients could be harvested on patients requiring it.

“Brain dead people are kept alive on artificial life support system and on removal of the system, the patient dies. Two independent teams of doctors will be formed to declare if a person is brain dead. A standard operating procedure (SOP) will also be formulated accordingly. One team will declare whether a patient is brain-dead or not, while the other would examine the body for confirmation after six hours of the declaration. With SCB as the nodal centre, state-run and private healthcare facilities with at least five ICU beds will be declared as harvesting centres,” a senior SCB official said adding that consent of the family members of the brain dead will be of paramount priority for the transplantation.

According to sources, SCB has successfully been carrying out kidney transplantations since March 19, 2012. “And since then renal transplantations have been done on 160 patients,” SCB Urology department head Datteswar Hota said.

SCB Nephrology department head Chittaranjan Kar said that acute crunch of organs for transplantation is one of the major reasons for deaths. “Odisha witnesses at least 1,500 road fatalities a month. If 10 per cent of these victims are considered brain dead and organs of five per cent of them could be used for transplantation, then at least 75 patients would get a new lease of life,” Kar said.

At a time when preparations were on for cadaveric transplantation, no other organ except for the kidney could be transplanted at SCB. The liver transplantation facility which was conceptualised six years back is yet to hit the ground even as equipment worth crores is gathering dust at SCB. This apart, transplantations of simple organs like cornea is nothing short of a pipedream.

SCB superintendent CBK Mohanty, however, said that efforts are on to kick-start the liver transplantation facility at the earliest.