Call to promote organ donation

Tirupati: SVIMS Director TS Ravikumar underlined the need to take up a sustained campaign to promote organ donation to provide new lease of life to scores of people. Speaking at a function held on the occasion of National Organ Donation Day in SVIMS on Saturday, Ravikumar said there is every need to recognise the altruism of deceased donor families and increase organ donations. He gave a call for creating awareness on donation of organs. He outlined the need of the hour for closing the huge gap in the need of organs for about 1 million patients in the waiting list nationally and added that a patient is added every 10 minutes to this list, and 15 patients die each day, for want of organ transplantation.

With regard to SVIMS performance, he said it doubled the kidney transplantations this year, while a total of 34 have been performed since 2010, this year alone, 10 kidney transplants were performed, six of them from deceased donors. Besides, cluster organ retrievals were done this year by distributing organs to the hospitals in Hyderabad, Visakhapatnam and Chennai. He thanked police and airport authorities for providing the green corridor, and also lauded the efforts of media, SVIMS doctors, nurses and administrative staff for transporting the retrieved organs to other place in a smooth and fast manner. Ravikumar announced that multi-organ transplantation including kidney, heart and liver, is one of the key silver Jubilee year (2017-18) targets for the SVIMS.

Further, research programme for pancreatic islet cell transplantation will be initiated with global collaborations, he said. Marking the occasion, the relatives of the two deceased organ donors late Murali and Dhananjaya Reddy families were felicitated. The families said by donating the organs to the needy people, Murali and Dhanjaya became immortal and thanked SVIMS administration for providing an opportunity to their family to involve in a noble cause. Faculty members, students and others were present.