Success and Challenges of Deceased Donation and Transplantation

Sunil Shroff¹, Sumana Navin¹, Lalitha Raghuram¹, Pallavi Kumar¹

¹MOHAN Foundation, Chennai, India

India started deceased donation programme after its law accepted brain death as form of death in 1995. The programme has been slow to take off, however significant strides have been made in a few states in the country and these success stories could be duplicated in other regions. Six of the 28 states have done better than rest in promoting the programme and have done 90% of the deceased donations in last 17 years. Similar is the state with corneal donations and of 45,000 donations last year.  The current donation rate in India still remain below 1 per million population however  2012 was a landmark year for the programme with almost 196 donations (Fig.1) in the country. The successful model of the state of Tamil Nadu which has a donation rate that is 10 times the national average could be duplicated in some of the other states provided the state government works together with other stake holders such as public, private hospitals and NGO’s. The overall potential of deceased donation is extremely high as the number of fatal deaths due to road traffic accidents every year exceeds 140,000 and head injury occurs in over 60% of such deaths. The current donation rate, if pushed to 3 per million, would take care of all the current requirements of organs. The recent amendments bringing in the required request law to ask for organs in event of brain death and compulsory appointment of transplant coordinator may give the required momentum to the programme.

Figure 1 - Deceased donation transplantations in India