Ms. Pallavi Kumar, Executive Director, MOHAN Foundation - Delhi-NCR visited the National Transplant Resource Centre (NTRC) Ministry of Health, Malaysia on February 9th 2012. She met with Dr. Lela Yasmin Mansor [Chief National Transplant (Donor) Procurement Manager], Dr. Muhammad Anis( Deputy and Clinical Manager) and Matron Jamaliah Kario, (Senior Nurse Donor Coordinator)
NTRC is formed by the Ministry of Health, under the administration of Hospital Kuala Lumpur which functions independently of the Transplant Centres. It is responsible for the public promotion, donor pledge registration, and training of hospital staff on Organ Donation on one hand, as well as for the clinical management and coordination at national level of the cadaveric organ and tissue donation and procurement for the whole country.
Comprising of full time nurse coordinators and 2 Medical (doctor) Procurement Managers , NTRC is responsible for all aspects of the donation process , from the detection and identification of the potential donor (brain death and cardiac death), making sure the brain death certification has been done, evaluating and carrying out the appropriate investigations to assess the suitability of the potential deceased donor, medically maintaining the donor, getting family and medico-legal consent and arranging the logistics of bringing the retrieval surgical teams from the various transplant centres that are located centrally in KL to the donor hospital to procure the donor organs .
They work with 19 hospitals (including private, government and university hospitals) and their strategy is to create a “top team” for each hospital which functions as the tissue and organ procurement team and consists of staff from within the hospital – neuro-physicians, intensivists, counsellors, anaesthetists, etc. Transplant staff is not part of the team. Since the team is from within the hospital, there is greater ownership of the programme. The entire work is governed under their Human Tissues Act 1997. They are under the process of modifying the act to make it more inclusive and effective.
To date, since the first cadaveric organ donation program started in 1976, they have had 361 organ as well as tissue donors. Their best donation rate was last year when they had 47 cadaveric donors (23 organ and tissue post brain death donors and 24 tissue donors post cardiac death) giving a rate of 1.66 donation per million population.
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