Acute shortage of organs is a universal problem – more so in developing Asian countries like India. What makes it worse is that the large majorities of organ failure patients never receive  any care and added to this  the constantly rising  incidence of Diabetes mellitus, hypertension and hepatitis B and C  carrier  state adds to the  growing numbers.  The rate of living renal transplantation in India is 3.25 per million population and that for cadaver is 0.08 per million population.  However the crude and age adjusted incidence rates of ESRD is estimated to be 151 and 232 per million population respectively in India

The chronic kidney disease (CKD) registry shows that 74.5% amongst the CKD patients are not receiving any form of renal replacement therapy. These pathetic figures are for kidney transplants and which is a much more evolved program in our country compared to liver and heart transplants.  There is no point even discussing the state of these other organ transplants as there is nothing much to discuss. In all this gloom, the only ray of light has been the recently maturing deceased donation programme in Tamil Nadu (TN) & Andra Pradesh (AP). Together these states have done over 400 deceased donors in the last 10 years resulting in over 1600 organs and tissues. The last 2-3 years have seen almost 50% of these donation take place which means there is a definite momentum in the programme. While TN now has its own state registry of waiting list recipients (www.tnos.org); AP is trying to put something similar in place. Why and how it all happened is well known in transplant circles of the country.

The number of organ donations in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh has increased in large measures due to  the presence of  good  trained coordinators in the programme.  Since December last year, many  of the coordinators  working in the programme in TN and AP have undergone  the one, three and six month training  in areas such as grief counseling and medical aspects  of organ donation and transplant  at MOHAN Foundation. . This has been followed up with short weekend courses. It is truly amazing to see the value some of these trained staff have added to the programme. These highly subsidized courses have been possible due to the grants MOHAN Foundation has received from funding agencies. Similar pilot projects need to be repeated in many parts of the  country, if we want  to make a success of the deceased donation  programme.

More information about the courses can be accessed from  http://courses.mohanfoundation.org