The Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research has started a full-fledged program to spread awareness about organ donation after the successful heart transplant done by the doctors of the institute.
The institute is going to hold a public forum on organ donation on September 5 to spread awareness about Organ Donation in India in general and in North India in particular. Online portal ‘lamp of life’ has been started to spread general awareness and facilitate dialogues on the subject of organ donation.
Dr RK Dhiman, Department of Hepatology said, “It is encouraging to see that within a short time span this portal has got around 400 hits which shows the interest of the people over this subject. Now it is the duty of PGI to turn this interest into success by enrolling more and more people into opt-in mode of organ donation.” A huge gap exists between patients who need organ transplants and potential donors. It's not that there aren't enough organs to transplant. Nearly every person who dies naturally, or in an accident, is a potential donor.
Even so, innumerable patients cannot find a donor. India lags far behind other countries in this regard. Rough estimates indicate that anywhere between two and three million Indians may have died in the last couple of years because they could not get an organ transplant. One person can save the life of about 10 persons.
In PGI itself there around one to two brain dead patient is received every week but their organs can’t be harvested because most of these patient lack the knowledge about organ donation and they also are ill informed about medical procedures and think that if they pledge organs to the institute the doctors will not try to revive the patient.
Refuting this claim Dr Dhiman said, “The first and foremost duty of a doctor is to treat a patient and at PGI we have very high standards of treatment. But the myth surrounding brain-dead patient is the main hindrance in organ harvesting from such patients which in turn can save many other lives.” Brain dead is an irreversible process and a patient who is brain dead is more or less dead. According to experts a brain dead person can be kept under life support to just keep his heart beating and organs functioning.
But once the life support is removed the patient will die because a brain dead person is unable to breath or perform any other activity. Even if a patient is kept on life support his survival chances are bleak as sooner or later the heart will stop beating.
Organ shortages are a global problem, but India lags behind much of the rest of the world. The organ donation rate from dead bodies in India is estimated to be a minuscule 0.05 per lakh people (although India has among the world's highest number of deaths from road accidents). Hong Kong's organ donation rate is less than 5 per million, while it's 25 per million in the United States and 35 per million in Spain.
In 1994, the government of India passed the Transplantation of Human Organs Act that legalized the concept of brain death and for the first time facilitated organ procurement from heart beating, brain dead donors. Dr Dhiman said, “If we start getting organs from brain dead donors a lot of life could be saved. We have even taken an initiative to bring ‘Green Heart-Driver’s license’ which is already there in Karnataka to make organ donation less cumbersome. These are special kind of licences on which the consent of the donor is mentioned and in case of an accident or some other mishap, when the patient is brain dead, the license will show if the person is an organ donor or not.”