Niveditha Sankaran, Transplant coordinator from Apollo Hospitals, Chennai, received the Best Transplant Coordinator’s award from Dr. Sunil Shroff, Managing Trustee, MOHAN Foundation, during the Transplant Coordinators Annual Workshop held in Hyderabad in August 2010. The award was instituted in memory of Swamynarayan, son of Mr. & Mrs. K. Raghuram, who head the Hyderabad chapter of MOHAN Foundation. Swamy passed away in 2004 following a road traffic accident and the Raghurams’ donated his organs.

Niveditha, while sharing her experiences as a transplant coordinator, said that she joined Apollo Hospitals as a staff nurse in the Critical Care Unit in 2006 and there she found that her interest lay in transplantation. She shifted to the transplant unit in 2008. There she became curious about the word ‘cadaver’ and ‘organ donation’ which was often pronounced in the ward and wanted to learn more about it. She then trained in MOHAN Foundation as a Transplant Coordinator and started working on the deceased organ donation programme in earnest. Niveditha, from January 2010, has so far counseled twenty five families, out of which twelve families said yes for organ donation. In total, she has successfully coordinated transplants from 10 deceased donors in Apollo Hospitals from January 2010 to August 2010. She hailed MOHAN Foundation for their training and said that without them she would not have reached such heights.