MOHAN Foundation was invited to conduct an awareness session on organ donation by hCentive Pvt. Ltd. for its staff on March 30, 2017. The session was coordinated by Jalaj Agarwal and Bipasha Das as part of their CSR initiative. hCentive had conducted a session earlier in January, 2015 also. Ms. Pallavi Kumar, Executive Director, MOHAN Foundation was the resource person for the talk. She was accompanied by Ms. Mareena Thomas, Programme Officer.

At the beginning of the session Ms. Pallavi asked the participants if they have ever heard of organ donation or brain death or about an organ donor card. While many had heard about organ donation, very few had ever heard of the term brain death. Ms Pallavi took them through the entire presentation and then opened the house for questions and clarifications.

It was a very enthusiastic and interactive group. Some of the questions asked were: After my death who gets the organs? How do the counselors convince a family who believes in life after death? For how long are the organs kept alive after brain death? Which are the hospitals in Uttar Pradesh that are has systems for organ donation in place? What are the procedures for eye donation?

Ms. Pallavi clarified that when a family agrees for organ donation, the hospital where the patient is admitted gets to transplant one kidney and one another organ if they have a matching recipient for the same in their hospital waiting list, while the rest of the organs go to the common pool and are allocated according to the state’s waiting list of patients. With her experience on counseling the families of brain death patients, Ms. Pallavi shared that she had never had any family expressing a concern of not having an organ in the next birth if they donated in this one. She shared that families have more real concerns such as – Who would the organs be allocated to? How much time will the entire process take? Or how would the body look after organ donation?

It was also shared that organs cannot be stored and every organs has a specific time limit from the time they are retrieved from the deceased body and transplanted into the recipient’s body. Names of the hospitals that have a deceased donation programme in NOIDA were also shared. The basic procedure to carry out eye donation was also explained.

There were 24 participants and 50 donor cards were picked up. Many participants picked up cards for their family members too.