New Delhi: With the aim to make organ transplant more accessible for patients in north India, Asian Institute of Medical Sciences (AIMS) in Faridabad is collaborating with MGM Healthcare in Chennai to launch a new heart and lung transplant centre.
Speaking at the launch event held in New Delhi Tuesday, Dr N K Pandey, chairman and managing director of AIMS, highlighted that while most heart transplant recipients were from north India, a majority of the donors came from the southern states. As a result, patients from the northern states preferred to travel to cities like Chennai to get transplants.
“There is a dearth of organ donation and good quality transplant centers in northern states which results in either the patients having to travel to the south or to procure organs from nearby states for transplantation,” Pandey said.
Doctors from both hospitals highlighted how awareness about organ donation also remains a major challenge in the country.
Speaking to ThePrint, Dr Prashant Rajagopalan, director of MGM Healthcare, said that the availability of cadaver organs remains the biggest challenge in organ donation.
“So many organs simply go to waste because people in the northern states are not aware about organ donation. Due to Covid, there was a huge rise in demand for lung donors – the list of patients waiting for organs to become available kept increasing but the availability of donors reduced during Covid,” he said.
He added that the collaboration between the two hospitals will help share knowledge and on-site transplant support from the team.
Dr KR Balakrishnan, director of the Institute of Heart and Lung Transplant and Mechanical Circulatory Support at MGM Healthcare, said that transplant surgery is the easiest part of the process.
“What is more challenging in a transplant surgery is the follow-up. A patient often faces immunological challenges post-surgery. The collaboration between the two hospitals will allow doctors to share knowledge on the best post-surgery practices,” Balakrishnan said.
He asserted that India is in a unique position to become a major source of generating scientific knowledge on heart and lung transplant but underlined that the government needs to work on improving availability of cadaver organs as well as help in quick transportation of donor organs.
He also added that the field of immunology in India needs more support as transplant recipients need continuous follow-ups to ensure that their bodies do not reject the transplanted organ.
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