On a recent trip to Hong Kong for a family vacation, Ms. Pallavi Kumar, Executive Director (Delhi-NCR) visited the Central Health Education Unit to learn more about the country’s deceased organ donation program. She met Dr. KUNG Kin Hang (Senior Medical and Health Officer) and Ms. CHEUNG Siu-Kam, Doreen (Senior Nursing Officer). The unit comes under the Department of Health(DH)
Dr. KUNG elaborated that Hong Kong, like India, suffers from organ shortage. He shared that therere were numerous organ donation campaigns in the past to increase the awareness of organ donations. These efforts were often piecemeal and not all of the organ donors did actually carry the organ donation cards at all times.
To circumvent this problem, The DH has set up the Centralised Organ Donation Register (CODR) to make it more convenient for prospective donors to voluntarily register their wish to donate organs after death, and for such wish to be more reliably recorded. The Register will enable medical personnel responsible for organ donation to know upon the patients' death about their wish to donate organs, and the bereaved family to acknowledge the deceased's wish to rekindle lives of other people. Currently, more than 78,000 registrations were recorded at the CODR.
Apart from registering at the CODR, the public may also carry signed organ donation cards or express their wish to healthcare workers if they wish to donate organs after death. Even in the event that a deceased person did not indicate his/her wish on organ donation by registration through the CODR or carrying signed organ donation cards, the organs of the deceased can still be donated to save lives with the consent of his/her family members.
Since the program is government led, it is definitely more organised. There are 7 public hospitals that serve as transplant centres. However many of the challenges they face are very similar to ours such as non identification/certification of brain death, relatives not knowing the wish of their loved ones & a lack of consensus amongst family members, traditional and religious beliefs around organ donation and lack of trained personnel to do the asking.
Despite everything, Hong Kong has seen a general trend of increase in organ donation rate, rising from about four for every million of our population in 2005 to about seven in 2010, which is higher than that of many advanced economies in Asia, such as Singapore (4.6) and Japan (0.8), though lower than some Western countries.
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