http://www.deccanchronicle.com/channels/cities/chennai/norms-hit-organ-donation-hard-989
September 7, 2011 By Anisha Francis
Article in Deccan Chronicle
Cadaver organ transplants in the state seem to have lost a bit of steam. Even though TN has crossed the 500 donors mark, 217 of them from the government general hospital in Chennai alone, the past few months have been very slow, lament officials.
While the rest of the nation looks up to TN’s programme as a role model and other states have set Tamil Nadu’s record deceased donor rate of 1.3 per million as a target (national average is 10 times lower, at 0.15 per million population), the problems plaguing the entire process in TN are many.
Superstitious beliefs and religious restrictions still put a spoke in the wheel for grief counsellors who approach the families of prospective donors to donate their loved one’s organs. However, the most common reason families refuse to donate organs is the never-ending wait for them to take the body home. Sometimes it takes three days to a week for all the formalities and paper work to be completed before the organs are harvested and the body is released for last rites.
While the entire procedure, including brain death certification and post-mortem, ought to take a maximum of 12-15 hours, as in corporate hospitals, the government set-up suffers unnecessary delays, say the doctors.
In the past two months, there have been cases where the organs have been wasted because of delays in the investigating police officers arriving at the hospital and preparing inquests for the post-mortem.
Says a young grief counsellor, “It is very disheartening when we manage to get the family’s consent to donate organs, but the precious organs are wasted due to procedural delays. Many patients are from the outskirts of Chennai, and the police officers take hours to get here, despite our repeatedly calling them.”
“Many people think that educated families are open to organ donation, but this is not true. Most of our donor families are from very poor backgrounds, often daily wage labourers or farmers from remote villages who have not even heard of brain death or organ transplants,” says Ms Sindhuja, a transplant coordinator at the GH. “Some people believe that their loved ones will be born without eyes and other organs in their ‘next life’ if they donate them to other people.”
Dr Sumana Navin, a coordinator with MOHAN foundation, calls for Islamic religious leaders to get involved with the cause and help spread awareness that organ donation does not go against the principles of Islam.
In Tamil Nadu, 25 per cent of all kidney transplants and 90 per cent of liver transplants are deceased donor transplants – the rest are living, related transplants.
“In India, there are 2.1 lakh people suffering from end-stage kidney disease who need transplants immediately, but we are barely doing 3,000 kidney transplants — both living and deceased donors put together. We really need to step up cadaver organ donation, especially since there are at least 93,000 accident victims who can be declared brain dead every year,” says Dr Sunil Shroff, managing trustee, MOHAN foundation.
